Trusted Reviews?

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Influential veteran tech journalist John Dvorak took Amazon (and the PR profession) to task in a PC Mag piece posted yesterday that asked "Are Amazon Reviews Corrupt?" His beef lies in the system through which so-called third-party reviewers are incentivized to share their so-called unbiased opinions. Dvorak cited a study in which a Cornell professor

"...independently surveyed 166 of Amazon's top 1,000 reviewers, examining everything from demographics to motives. What he discovered was 85 percent of those surveyed had been approached with free merchandise from authors, agents or publishers."

PC Mag's John Dvorak

Of course, Mr. Dvorak points the finger (I didn't say which finger) squarely at the PR profession who he purports to exert pernicious influence over these supposed "man on the street" reviews:

"It's a known fact that PR agencies and corporations have been burrowing into the community of online, "public" reviewers and obscure bloggers and easily corrupting them with trinkets... Now there is some proof that there is a problem."

He continued:

"I've always thought they could be easily corrupted by smart public relations folks who have already dove into what they call social media. This includes phony personas on Twitter and Facebook that are used to sway public opinion, shipping free goodies to "influential" bloggers, and things like this Amazon scandal."

By comparison, Mr. Dvorak clearly prefers the Yelp model for reviewing restaurants and the like. He writes:

"This was a "man of the street" system that worked. It allowed readers to deconstruct who the reviewer was in such a way that you could trust the ones that agreed with your tastes and opinions, so you could use them to expand your reach. Scammers, shills, and stooges were apparent."

Amazon, he writes,

...is "designed to move product. There is no product to move on Yelp—at least not in quite the same way. Yelp does not ship anything."

Mr. Dvorak's piece, prompted by the Cornell study and his 30 years chronicling trends in the tech space, raises some important questions about the squirrely nature of Amazon reviews, and the role PR peeps supposedly play in astroturfing the process. Here's a link to the study which seeks to sort out the underlying motivations of reviewers for the world's most successful e-tailer:

"Our study holds an assumption and asks a question: the assumption is that there are no free lunches. So how come Amazon has managed to persuade so many people to give them the morsels from which they have built one of the biggest free lunches ever? That is the question."

Elsewhere in PC Magazine, we learn of Bizzy, which intends to take on Yelp by offering mini-reviews, while Yelp is getting in the location-based deal biz big time.  

Meet the Media

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Forbes "Mixed Media" Columnist Jeff Bercovici

Forbes media watcher Jeff Bercovici set tongues-a-waggin yesterday with his piece piling on an already beleaguered David Pogue. It seems that the consummate and always-entertaining gadget guy for The New York Times and elsewhere, like hundreds of journalists before him, agreed to participate in one of the many industry events wherein PR professionals gain insights on how best to engage reporters.

Mr. Pogue's ethical transgression, at least in Mr. Bercovici's interpretation of The Times's conflict-of-interest policies, was accepting a fee to appear (which the event sponsor refused to acknowledge), and for allowing the sponsor to charge attendees for the right to hear him speak. Bercovici observed:

Gadget Guy David Pogue

"But even if he wasn’t paid, it appears Pogue ran foul of the policy, specifically the rules on “Steering Clear of Advice Roles,” which state:

It is an inherent conflict for a journalist to perform public relations work, paid or unpaid. Staff members may not counsel individuals or organizations on how to deal successfully with the news media….

They should not take part in public relations workshops that charge admission or imply privileged access to the press, or participate in surveys asking their opinion of an organization’s media relations or public image."

Ragan Communications Chief Mark Ragan

As president of the Publicity Club of New York, an organization whose primary mission is to help PR professionals work more harmoniously and effectively with journalists, I was a little disappointed that the CEO of the organization that hosted Mr. Pogue didn't more assiduously defend the practice of helping PR pros do their jobs better.

In fact, with some 32,000 followers and nearly 27,000 tweets to his name, @MarkRaganCEO couldn't turn off the bot for a moment to weigh in on Mr. Bercovici's story or even post his POV on the Ragan.com website. Oh well.

As for PCNY, we will continue to host journalists for the express purpose of sharing how editorial decisions are made, and offering best PR practices to follow when proposing story or interview ideas. We do not pay our panelists, but that has never been a deterrent in attracting a who's who of New York-based media to our events, including many from The New York Times. (See right column here.)

And while I'm at it, I should mention that our next luncheon will take place July 21 and will feature senior producers and talent coordinators for NBC "Today," ABC "GMA," "Live! With Regis & Kelly," "Rachael Ray Show" and the "Wendy Williams Show." We'll also offer a live webcast.

Update 6/29: Mark Ragan weighs in via a comment below in which he says: "I have commented repeatedly on this issue—not only on the original Poytner Institute blog but also on the blogs of The Observer and Forbes." Glad to hear. My bad for not seeing. Thanks.

Friday's Video Views

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A Bloomberg Game Changer

Bloomberg flexes its journalistic muscle with this 25-minute interview with today's definitive "game changer" Mark Zuckerberg.




Page One Media Editor

Apparently the director of New York Times film doc "Page One" fell ill at the last minute and asked Bruce Headlam, the news org's usually behind-the-scenes media editor, i.e., David Carr & Brian Stelter's editor, to fill in on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Here's the clip in which which Headlam did an admirable job.

The Daily Show
Tags: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

Flip Melt(Down?)

It's an interview like this that makes me wonder whether we really are in a bubble. Fueled by a multi-million dollar investment from one of Silicon Valley's biggest VCs, the founder of The Flip Cam, which Cisco purchased and then shuttered, has cooked up his next big thing...literally. The dynamic digital duo of Mossberg and Swisher recently caught up with Jonathnan Kaplan at the D9 Demo conference.




Billionaire Brothers' Bulls**t

No strangers to these pages, the two billionaire brothers who are fueling the Tea Party and other anti-American causes are the subject of progressive documentary filmmaker Robert Greenwald's latest "campaign." This trailer should resonate with any PR professional who's been asked to deploy nefarious (and opaque) tactics to advance a client's message.




Loopy Idea?

Not sure if this will fly, by Loopt got some buzz this week for reverse-engineering groupon's biz model. The site allows individuals to band together to demand discounts from merchants from whom they seek products or services.




A Gervaisian Mokumentary

Ricky Gervais this week released this mini mokumentary to promote his latest sitcom "Life's Too Short" (as is this clip).



via TheWrap

Paid, Earned & Owned: Revisited

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Eighteen months ago, Forrester's Sean Corcoran took a stab at an org chart to illustrate the new interactive marketing paradigm. Specifically, he attempted to further define terms popularized by several digital thought leaders for the types of media campaigns clients have at their disposal to advance their marketing goals, i.e., owned, paid and earned. Here's how it framed out:

For a recent presentation at a large news organization, I decided to revisit the much buzzed-about Forrester chart to give the communications professionals in the room a sense of this new media paradigm and its practical implications for the PR professional. After all, as much as has changed in our business, our clients still derive value through our ability to build them a positive branded presence in "the media."

With that said, the media itself has changed through fragmentation, new orders of influence, and time-shifted consumption via myriad channels and devices. More significantly, the means by which we help clients gain that positive branded (increasingly digital) footprint also has evolved. As Mr. Corocoran wrote:

"Ultimately these types of media work best together but making the hard choices of what to include and what not to include is crucial - especially when budgets are tight. But if you simply start by categorizing your media and identifying the right roles based on your objectives, then your on the right path."

When revisiting the chart, I found it flawed in some respects. Instead of three categories of media, I added a fourth, "shared," not as a media category in itself, but rather as the desired bi-product of the other three.

In my revisions to the Forrester chart (in red), the description of owned and paid media remain pretty much the same - with Facebook and YouTube added to the mix of owned media.

I diverge from Forrester in how I define earned media, which I view as the art of working with editorial decisionmakers (e.g., the media filter) to secure news, feature, or op-ed page coverage. Sure, "shared" media is in a sense earned media, but it is pretty much out of the hands of the communications manager. It just occurs when one or more of the other three media types are deftly used to capture imaginations.

Case in point: the Old Spice "paid" TV commercial was posted on Old Spice's "owned" YouTube channel from which it could be linked via "earned" and "shared" media. We all know where this ended up.

Many marketers often skip the paid piece altogether and create content explicitly for YouTube, Twitter and Facebook in a play for editorial media attention and consumer sharing.

Nike "Write the Future"

Nike's "owned" 3-minute "Write the Future" "ad" for the World Cup was never intended as a paid TV commercial. It went right to YouTube where it set a viral record of 7.8 million views in its first week on the site. Nike also encouraged fans to sign up on its specially created Nike Football page on Facebook. Did the company really even need to issue a news release?

Another noteworthy case is when Google posted to its weblog the news of its new image search function. (Does Google PR even have an account with a paid wire service?) Its "owned" news, plus a couple of Google-produced videos, earned a story by influential consumer tech news outlet Engadget from which it was shared far and wide. See metrics:

How Engadget Readers Shared News of Google Image Search

Steve Jobs is famous for setting tongues-a-wagging with his periodic public postings. Do you think he really needed to subject himself to the scrutiny of a Walt Mossberg or Michael Arrington to make his point heard? Nah.

Of course, most of us do not represent Apple or Google, which have the capacity (and followings) to unilaterally catalyze conversations. We mortals thus have to rely on delivering more engagingly creative executions, while deftly navigating the new media channels now at our disposal.

Each channel has its own strengths and limitations, but hopefully the right combination, plus a cogent and compelling narrative, can synergistically produce a sharing effect among one's friends and followers, their friends and followers, and so on and so forth.

Friday's Video Views

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Friends & Followers...Really

Here's a Brit who's taken his social media mojo out into the real world (where it didn't seem to work). Very clever. H/T Dave Peck via the English National Opera YouTube page!




iPod Magic

Would you invite this magician to your child's birthday? Probably not (though he's coming to mine!) (via Gizmodo)




Geek Chic

Yes the star-studded Webby Awards were held this week. One of the evening's highlights occurred when Daniel (Harry Potter) Radcliffe awarded Anna (The Devil Wears Prada) Wintour with a Webby for Vogue.com. Since we all seem to live in short form, acceptance speeches were mandated to five words max.




Subservient Swan Song

From the Subservient Chicken, which unilaterally put Miami shop Crispin Porter Bogusky on the digital creative map, to this, the agency's song (on a turntable) to mark the end of CPB's long-time relationship with Burger King. Via AdWeek's AdFreak




Internet? What's That? (circa 1994)

Couch talk on the set of NBC Today at a time when the @ symbol still hadn't found its place in the American lexicon.




Evil GaGa

If you thought Lady Gaga most emulated Madonna, this new video makes me wonder whether Britney (in her meltdown phase) could be Gaga's real role model. Then again, Dr. Evil surely figures in there somewhere.

What Sustains Social

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I suppose I should be grateful that Angry Birds, or worse, FarmVille hasn't seeped into my life. It's enough of a time sync to intelligently feed the big three of Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, and still keep my paying clients satisfied. Thank you, Ping.fm.

Now that Zynga's "crushin it" on mobile, perhaps I should trash my Blackberry (again), and upgrade to Droid or i/OS to get in on the action? Nah, not exactly the killer app for me. iPhone5, perhaps, or maybe I'll wait until Oprah picks up the documentary to check it out.

I will admit that I have been tooling with a couple of new social nets - one seemingly on the wane and another on the rise. Empire Avenue gives its members (players?) a stock valuation and some currency, and then uses their engagement with the social graph, site activity, and others' purchases of your stock to set share price.

When it first debuted, all the cool kids jumped on board. I took my eaves (EA's currency) and proceeded to purchase shares in the Alley and Valley's movers & shakers.

This has paid off handsomely, albeit it virtually. I bought 20 shares of Robert Scoble (Ticker: SCOBLE) at 101 eaves a month ago. He's now trading at 127. I bought 20 shares of Jeremiah Owyang (Ticker: OWYANG) at 75. He's now at 92, but trending downward.

Could Jeremiah have lost that lovin feeling? My stock (Ticker: PETERH) is in the 30 range, and still a great value. (Hint.)

Turntable.fm is the second new and much buzzed-about channel to splash on the social scene. It's a DJ-driven, invite-only site for which one has to correctly answer a trivia question from some obscure movie scene to be considered for admittance.

As a former progressive FM college radio jock and someone who has a healthy disdain for the NYC radio dial, let alone satellite and the Web for their paucity of memorable tracks buried in the discographies of the classic artists that defined my generation, I started a "room" called "Lost Tracks."

Turntable.fm gives its members a fun platform to communicate and collaborate in the construct of music playlists with other similarly-minded DJ's on the channel.

I like the execution, but admittedly am still wrapping my arms around the site's functionality and what it takes to build kharma and get "points." I suppose I need to make more time to guest DJ in other rooms, and invite others to join mine.

Oxytocin molecule

So what drives social media engagement anyway? There are those who attribute one's proclivity to engage in the social graph to the same chemical that's produced when one falls in love: oxytocin i.e., I think I'm in love!). This explains a lot.

My PR-minded readers will certainly be attuned to the challenge many of us share in helping clients get past the initial splash of launch media attention and SM buzz to a more sustained presence in the media. The conversation was deafening when Empire Avenue first burst onto the scene. It was clear that considerable thought went into the development of the site. Yet, here we are a month or two into it, and those fickle diviners of digital immortality may already be onto the next big thing.

Can corporate marketers drive that continued awareness? Social Media Group's Maggie Fox thinks not. She posited that it would be foolish for corporations to "trade" in the virtual world of Empire Avenue, especially publicly-traded ones. In fact, she advised those considering investing in her as follows: "Definitely don't buy me - can't you see where this is going? You'll lose EVERYTHING."

Currently, Turntable.fm is ramping rapidly, driven by everyone's desire to share their tastes in music and mix mastery, let alone some solid founder pedigree.

Let's hope that Turntable.fm (and Empire Avenue's) proprietors continue to innovate to keep their users, and those who write, post and tweet about the innovation economy, satisfied and engaged.

I was thus encouraged to receive a welcome email from Turntable.fm's co-founder Billy Chasen on the state and goals of his site.

Pandora, watch out (or maybe not)

It Works Both Ways

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Columbia University

Yesterday, I made my way over to the Morningside Heights campus of Columbia University for ReadWriteWeb's inaugural 2Way Summit. ReadWriteWeb, IMHO, ranks right up there with TechCrunch, GigaOm, Mashable, TheNextWeb, BusinessInsider/SAI and AllThingsD as among the most influential sites from which one can glean the freshest take on the evolving digital landscape.

The first day's festivities opened up with RWW founder/co-editor Richard McManus welcoming the crowd of about 150 and introducing a guy named Alex Blagg as the event moderator. Mr. Blagg apparently made a name for himself in web circles with his Bajillion Hits website in which he bragadociously proclaims to be the king of the Internet.

His attempt at irreverence and laughs yesterday ("I'm the Bill Gates of Internet hits!"), however, fell short. The dressed-down Mr. Blagg instead dressed-down the audience with his buzzwordy in-your-face opening remarks and presentation. For those unfamiliar with his shtick (i.e., me), he came off as condescending and confrontational in a room full of a fair share of digital luminaries. Ultimately, his bracing style wore off, and the day moved on. (If this guy is the self-proclaimed king of all things Internet, why the .biz domain and a mere 3000 followers on Twitter? Just asking.)

NPR's Andy Carvin with Columbia Journalism's Emily Bell

The opening session featured a tete-a-tete with NPR's Andy Carvin and Columbia's Tow Center for Digital Journalism's Emily Bell, an esteemed alumnus of UK's Guardian Newspaper Group. I had just heard Andy speak alongside Brian Stelter at the Personal Democracy Forum in which he shared his unexpected new and all-consuming day-job "anchoring" the events as they unfolded in real-time from the Arab uprising.

Carvin's appearance was most timely given the previous day's revelations he helped break about the massive hoax perpetrated by a married man from Georgia masquerading (for five years!) as the influential blogger "Gay Girl in Damascus."

Here are some notable quotables from Andy:

"No one had ever met her in person."

"I see this more as a media failure as opposed to an Internet failure"

"What I've been doing on Twitter is akin to what a news anchor is doing during a live interview"

The Twitter feed of Arab uprising is "as close to real-time war reporting as we've ever come"

"Twitter is my assignment editor. My Twitter account is the [news] product. Storify helps with archiving"

"I feel like I'm doing a public service here. Imagine if they had smartphones in Rwanda or Bosnia?"

Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures

Next up was Union Square Ventures' principal Fred Wilson to whom I owe a debt of gratitude for shuttering his Flatiron Partners and leaving an opening for me to form Flatiron Communications six years ago. Mr. Wilson used his 20 minutes on stage to revisit a post he made in January on content-shifting. He then proceeded to rattle off a range of tools and apps that permit multi-media content to be readily accessed on whatever device or screen available at the time.

Here are some of the companies he mentioned in his talk: Etsy (Circle), Netflix, Instapaper, Rdio, Adkeeper, PercentMobile, and some highlights:

"I want to be able to curate a social graph with a new service than importing Twitter/Facebook relationships"

"Great content will always be highly valued. Distribution systems however will be threatened," eg, cable video (but not cable-delivered data)

"Maybe the most interesting media type right now for content shifting is online music."

"I moved my entire software apps into cloud"

"One of the reasons Netflix is so successful is that they have made their service ubiquitous. Netflix stock went from $20 to $250/share when its ubiquitous streaming strategy began."

Entrepreneurs: "It doesn't make sense to build for just one platform."

Future of media: "microchunk it, free it, syndicate it, monetize it."

"The iconic content shifting service on the Internet is Instapaper."

Danah Boyd & the Truth About Sexting

Dana Boyd took the stage to share some stats on the growing sexting trend among teens. No mention of Rep. Weiner, but then again, he doesn't fit the demo.

Ms. Boyd was followed by the eminently quotable Jason Calacanis who used his time on stage to diss a few folks and extol the virtues and value of video-based expertise such as those featured on his Mahalo network. Here's RWW's summary of Mr. Calacanis's provocative remarks:

Mahalo's Jason Calacanis

"Web 3.0 is the age of expertise"

"Video is 100% of what we're doing. Mahalo is largest non-UGC presence on YouTube."

"I am disgusted by how much content creation has become about gaming the system."

"I want to create a Klout to rate [the expertise of] web authors. Bought the domain name PageRate.com." I just need someone to build it.

"Blogs are not where the action is - it's in email and video"

"The future is for experts to become publishers & have consumers talk directly with them!"

"Blogging Is Dead" & Why Stupid People Shouldn't Write"

"It's not that there aren't any good bloggers left, They just get drowned out by the bad ones!"

"When I'm hiring, if someone doesn't have a Twitter & Facebook accounts & their own domain name? They aren't hired."

"The concept of journalism is going away."

Client obligations prevented me from sticking out the rest of the Summit, but RWW has done a fab job making the presented content readily accessible.

Photos: Peter Himler w/ Canon PowerShot SX20 IS. Fred Wilson photo courtesy of RWW.

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Like + Follow = ?

This week, Twitter introduced its "follow" button, which is not dissimilar to Facebook's "like" button, and a cousin to Google's "+1" button. Geesh I'm confused. Here's a look at Google +1. H/T HuffPost Tech




GMail Rapport

Since we're talking Google, here's a GMail plug-in called Rapportive whose upgrade in recent weeks set the digital cognoscenti's tongues-a-waggin, mostly for its neat Twitter hosting function:




Our Choice by Al Gore

Here's a TED talk introducing the first feature-length interactive book. And it happens to be the sequel to Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth. Via TED HT Guy Kawasaki




Bloomberg Digital Ramps Up

My pal Andy Plesser, who recently inked a strategic partnership with Digitas, grabbed some time with Bloomberg digital maven Kevin Krim. Krim talk to Beet.TV about the changes afoot at the world's most robust business news organization.




Class, Don't Forget Your Smart Phones

As the debate rages on over the societal effects of short form versus long form prose, here's a teacher that uses Twitter with his mobile phone-enabled students to make a stronger learning connection. CNN reports:




Attn: All Cat-Loving Single Men!

And for you feline fanatics, this video is en route to viral nirvana. It features a most perplexing young woman's first audition video (supposedly) for eHarmony. So glad to have celebrated my wedding anniversary this week.

Newsing the Web

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We're in the midst of another one of those mindboggling weeks in New York City for anyone toiling in the PR, marketing, media, and digital arenas. So much to see. So much to do. FourSquare check-ins are swarming. It's Internet Week!

Of course, working stiffs need to be judicious about the events they choose to attend. This stiff has a personal penchant for the intersection of politics and technology, and thus chose to audit the opening day of Andrew Rasiej and Micah Sifrey's Personal Democracy Forum. (Thanks #PdF11's PR rep Justin Kazmark).

I brought along my #2 son who just finished college as a Government & Economics double major and will start his SF-based job as a financial analyst in the Tech-Media-Telecom sector in July. Right up his alley.

We chose two sessions. The first, titled "Newsing the Live Web," featured a panel with two of the most influential and prolific users of Twitter - The Times's Brian Stelter and NPR's Andy Carvin - who sat alongside Columbia College (of Chicago) professor Dan Sinker. Sinker achieved Twitter fame (and a book deal) for his profane and lyrical portrayal of @MayorEmanuel on Twitter leading up to this past winter's Chicago Mayoral election.

ABC (Australia's) Peter McEvoy rounded out the group. He shared video of a live news conference with former Prime Minister John Howard (sitting before a real-time Twitterstream). Things got interesting when an anonymous Twitterer suggested throwing a shoe at Howard, and it happened. Moderating was the inimitable former New York Timeswoman and world-traveling bon-vivant Jennifer 8. Lee who recently joined the board of the Center for Public Integrity.

NPR's Andy Carvin (l) & NYTimes's Brian Stelter 

Stelter's "newsing the live web:" epiphany occurred when his employer decided to feed his tweets on the home page of NYTimes.com during his on-site coverage of the devastation in the wake of the tornadoes that swept through Joplin, MO.

His only frustration was in his inability to personally follow-up with those who followed, commented and re-tweeted his micro-dispatches from the field. He faulted Twitter for not archiving older tweets.

Carvin talked about his migration from NPR's social media maven, charged with building stronger bridges between NPR and its audience, to his current role as a full-time and credible curator of all things Twitter emanating from the Arab uprising in the Middle East, starting with Tunisia. At the height of the Egyptian revolution, he put out some "1400 tweets a day." He noted: "I have zero staff helping me out. My tweeps have my back."

Carvin sees his role less as a "human newswire," but more as "anchor coverage." He's now back to 400+/- tweets/day and his bosses have asked him to further develop this new real-time "news" vein he so effectively tapped over the last several months. From the audience Craig Newmark suggested that Mr. Carvin put to prose his entire experience chronicling the Arab Spring. Good idea.

Doc Searls (l) & Dan Gillmor

The second session we attended was simply billed as a "Deep Dive" with two of today's most important contributors to the digital revolution. They are Doc Searls and Dan Gillmor, authors respectively of two seminal books that left a profoundly personal and professional impression on this blogger: The Cluetrain Manifesto and We the Media.

In the audience were other thought-leaders including Google's Bob Wyman, Salon.com co-founder Scott Rosenberg, NYU professor Jay Rosen, Kevin Marks, Tummelvision.TV's Deborah Schultz and many others I didn't recognize.

 The conversation covered the gamut with Searls insisting that we are still at the very early stages of the Internet revolution. He said that "Facebook, for all the good it does, is AOL 2.0." He also railed at marketers for their insidious tracking of consumers (as covered in that Wall Street Journal series): "...cookies from websites follow you around the internet like sniffer dogs after your scent...online, users have no more power than sites give them."

Gillmor opened by talking about transparency in journalism, and observed that mainstream news organizations have really never been transparent. They don't reveal how they make their sausage. "How we do it is our business." He did acknowledge mainstream outlets who took the time to explain how they did their journalism as part of their news package.

I took the liberty to ask about what I perceive as the waining influence of mainstream news organizations to effect regulatory or legislative policy shifts. There was a day when the New York Times set the national media agenda, with a hard-hitting story on its front page having an almost immediate and tangible consequence.

The Times remains one of the world's most influential news organizations, but how have other watchdog mainstream media fared in this splintered, ephemeral news environment when it coms to catalyzing  change?  Gillmor (or was it Searls) did note that a single profound post by someone like Clay Shirky could eventually elicit a thousand in-bound links and exert its own undue influence. (Maybe I shouldn't be so nostalgic for media as government's fourth check & balance?)

Someone suggested that at the local level (in Baltimore), hyperlocal bloggers succeed in righting wrongs through their enterprise reporting (which gets picked up by the mainstream).

Anyway, you'll be able to hear the conversation here. (RT: 54 minutes) The audio is not fab, but the content certainly was...at least for those of us toiling in these trenches.


Photos: Peter Himler, Canon PowerShot XS20 IS

Friday's Video Views

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Angry Birds Come to Life

Please forgive me, but I've never played Angry Birds. (Is there a Blackberry app for it?) For the many obsessed fans of Rovio's most addictive app, here's a real-life APParition. (via Mashable)

http://draft.blogger.com/


Cyber Propaganda

Our so-called friends (and recent Columbia University Journalism award winners) at Al Jazeera report that the U.S. is developing software to help win the virtual hearts and minds of terrorists everywhere (or at least in the Middle East). Here's the story from TNW, and the clip from Al Jazeera.




AllThings Glee

Client obligations kept me from keeping close tabs on this year's D9 Conference, aka The Walt & Kara Show." It seems from this coast that this year's event outdid last year's gathering of all the digital movers & shakers you can shake a stick (or a stare) at. Love that Groupon used the venue to pass out a paper news release on its $750M IPO. Also, cool that the character everyone loves to hate on Glee took the opening spotlight. Here's Jane Lynch's bit:




140 DPI Only???

Here's a video clip of the new photo search function that Twitter announced this week.




Not Aaron, but Andrew Ross Sorkin

While we were at our #2 son's graduation last week, we DVD'd the small screen version Andrew Ross Sorkin's book Too Big To Fail, which bowed on HBO. You gotta love William Hurt as Hank Paulson and hate James Woods as Dick Fuld. Here's Business Insider founder Henry Blodget's chat with the book author and New York Times Dealbook chief Mr. Sorkin in which he talks about how he got to be where he is. More BI video clips here




Juggling and Riding a Unicycle Live from The White House

Our friends at Lost Remote bring our attention to the video of the Twitter-fueled Q&A between NPR's Andy Carvin and Foreign Policy's Marc Lynch with Dep. National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes immediately following President Obama's recent speech on the Middle East and North Africa. White House director of digital strategy Macon Phillips opened up the 42-minute session, which Carvin described as follows: "It felt like we were juggling and riding a unicycle simultaneously, all the while trying to interview a senior administration official.”




A Popular Pastime...in Lithuania

I don't know how else to describe this video....(Some things are better left unsaid.)

Truth in PR

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Sure it was dumb. And yes, the firm, and the industry in which it prominently resides, have paid a heavy toll for this unfortunate transgression. I'm talking of course about the recent firestorm generated by two former journalists, new to agency life, who email-pitched an influential writer to pen an opinion piece on behalf of an unnamed client.

In so doing, the two (unknowingly?) breached their firm and its founder's longstanding ethical guidelines. Still, the real transgression may have occurred when the firm agreed to execute this clandestine assignment, blinded by the allure of an irresistible new and most notable client.

As an alumnus of this global agency, I tweeted at the time that I believed this gaffe was an agency aberration, not the standard practice. And I'm sure the high profile nature of the client disproportionately exacerbated the unwelcome media spotlight on an industry that in recent years has actively advocated the virtues of corporate transparency....at least in public. Privately, I'm not so sure.

When CNN called me for a comment on the aforementioned imbroglio, I did opine that many big-named PR firms continue to serve up other insidious practices that put them at even greater risk for unwanted media and public criticism. Most involve setting up or enlisting third-party organizations to advocate on behalf of client issues, with the client secretly footing the bill. Then there's the use of manufactured language that purposely distorts the truth.

One theory that emerged from this recent mess paints a doomsday scenario of a shrinking news industry and ascendent PR industry, and the societal consequences such an imbalance portends. Here's what one of the (conveniently unnamed) writers for The Economist wrote last week in an article trenchantly titled "Slime-slinging: Flacks vastly outnumber hacks these days. Caveat lector:"

"The incident shows how the upheaval in the news business is working for, and against, the PR firms. Newspapers and other old media are losing influence—and thus becoming less worth lobbying. But job cuts and online obligations mean journalists are also more desperate for copy, making them a softer touch."

Mark Story, a DC-based social media consultant and adjunct professor who has an MBA and a degree in Spanish, weighed in on this meme via his Posterous page with a thoughtful post titled "Journalism Vacuum Filled by PR Professionals, or Spin Doctors?" In it, he disagrees with CJR/ProPublica's recent caustic contention that PR people are unduly influencing the public dialogue left by a waning fourth estate. In the CJR piece, the author wrote:

"An investigative reporter for The New York Times, Barstow has written several big stories about the shoving match between the media and public relations in what eventually becomes the national dialogue. As the crowd at the hearing clearly showed, the game has been changing. "The muscles of journalism are weakening and the muscles of public relations are bulking up -- as if they were on steroids," he says."

Mr. Story concluded his piece with three caveats to consider when assessing whether PR pros are as insidious as many journalists like to paint them out to be:

• Not all PR practitioners are good guys. Some of them really suck.

• To avoid being called “front group” or practicing “astroturf,” you need to have complete transparency about who you are and who supports you. This is the same thing as the annoying thing at the end of political commercials like “I’m Karl Marx, and I approve this message” – or worse yet, the impossible to read fine print at the bottom of the screen that appears for about .1 seconds describing who paid for the ad.

• Never, ever lie. If you lie, you get busted, especially in the rough and tumble world of public relations, public affairs and politics. If you are engaged in a fight and have opposition, someone will find you out and bust you – publicly.

In my experience, journalism's ranks are not shrinking, but instead exploding if one considers the number of "media" outlets that exist today. Sure, the big-branded mainstream outlets suffer growing (I mean shrinking) pains, but that's not to say that PR has filled the void. Rather, I'd contend that any individual with an expertise, a keyboard, and a Posterous, Tumbler, Twitter, Facebook or Wordpress account, have enriched the media landscape.

I have observed one distinct bi-product of a rapidly growing PR industry: the increasing difficulty PR pros have in breaking through the competitive din to convince beleaguered journalists of the editorial merit of their clients' products, services or POV. There's simply too much misguided fluff out there - even with significantly more outlets to engage.

As for the future of the PR industry, it is clearly primed for more negative scrutiny until the day arrives when transparency is not just a buzzword, but a universally accepted practice. Same goes for privately-funded political advertising.