Mucking around with Muck Rack, why journalists Tweet and why I follow them

I like Muck Rack. More and more … I started using the site sometime back to identify journalists who Tweet. That, in keeping with my longheld belief that anyone who works in media relations needs to try any avenue to better “get inside a journalists’ head,” to understand more completely what their coverage interest is, what makes them tick, what irks them, what kinds of newsroom and deadline pressures they face.

That said, I don’t see any real value from the PR-perspective in Muckrack’s one-line press release service. I just don’t think the Tweet-media registered with the site are going to use Muckrack.com as a primary source for receiving news releases — I mean, c’mon, who’s gonna sit and watch the MuckRack.com scroll all day long. The “wire editor,” maybe, if that position even exists any longer.

What I am learning from using Muckrack’s registry — which you can also admittedly do in other ways, using TweepML.org or NiemanLab’s Twitter stream, for example — is that the demographic fo Twitter-journalists is varied and what you find varies with each kind of journalist:

• Younger tech journalists, particularly Silicon Valley-based, tend to be snarkier, uhber-geeky and dismissive of those who aren’t, which is what one would expect from the techno-ghetto crowd, generally;

• Older journalists slower on the uptake, but those who bother to Tweet taking it seriously as a platform that a) they need to learn about and use; and b) is at the very least a useful tool for broadcasting their coverage;

• Mainstream news organizations obviously encouraging their reporters and editors to use it just, that way, as an Internet broadcast tool;

• Some individual journalists obviously using it to help build their reputation — always a prime concern of a large percentage of journalists I’ve ever known — and to help build their personal ranking on Google.

What I’m also learning is that Twitter is not necessarily a great way to establish direct contact with journalists, not yet anyway. Not that there ever has been a single, sure-fire way for PR people to establish contact with journalists … so why think that Twitter would be any different!?

But, generally speaking, I’m getting the clear impression that Twitter as point-multipoint broadcast is uppermost in the minds of most journo-users and that the self-erected barriers to journalists’ direct interaction with the public are not going to be subverted anytime soon by Twitter, the opinions of social media evangelists notwithstanding.

What Real PR HR Managers Really Want from New PR Hires

Sorry, but couldn’t resist a new headline take on my previous post on What Real Journalists Really Want from Public Relations, but “this just in” …

The 2009 Digital Readiness Report: Essential Online Public Relations and Marketing Skills, produced by social media newsroom-provider iPressroom, in collaboration with Trendstream, Korn/Ferry International and PRSA. (You can register and download it from the iPressroom site by clicking on the title, above, or directly from this site by clicking on the image, at left.)

The press release has been out since Aug. 10, while I just found out about it through MarketingVox, thanks to a Tweet today from @kathycabrera. The survey was conducted over a 6-week period this past Spring, through online questionnaires completed by a total of 278 public relations, marketing and HR professionals recruited by the sponsors.

Not a bad sample survey, though it’s not immediately clear if all survey respondents completed all of the questions — nor even how many questions there were — so one is not entirely certain if the percentages cited indicated percentages of the total survey population, or the respondents for each question. Not a minor consideration in gauging survey reliability.

That said, assuming the survey population is significantly representative, the results are interesting. According to a press release — not, pointedly, a “social media news release” — put out by the survey sponsors, among the key findings are:

• When searching for prospective new hires, social media communications skills are nearly as important as traditional media relations skills.

• Public relations leads marketing in the management and oversight of all social media communications channels within organizations.

• Marketing leads public relations in the management and oversight of bulk email communications and search engine optimization.

• Social networking, blogging and micro-blogging skills are the three most important social media communications skills for job candidates to have, according to public relations and marketing hiring decision makers; and,

• Most organizations are considering hiring social media specialists.

Of course, it’s in the interest of principal survey sponsor iPressroom to highlight these findings and I’d be much more comfortable with the published results if we knew actual numbers of respondents per each question asked.

Still, my “gut reaction” is that it all makes sense — PR old-timers already have the traditional media relations and account management skills; what many agencies are lacking is social media-savvy younger account execs to foster and bring up through the ranks as the media landscape continues to change.

Certainly worth a read-through and sharing!

E-mail this: Bookmark this:

Walter Cronkite, In Memoriam: Thanks for the authenticity!

Many have already said and written far more than could I about Walter Cronkite, his career as a journalist and his important role as a communicator for a nation and a world going through difficult times in the 1960s and 1970s.

I’d just like to add my own thanks for his authenticity as a communicator.

Walter Cronkite showed us that authenticity is the stuff of personal integrity, decades before authenticity as a marketing concept became a buzzword for new media evangelization.

The kind of authenticity and personal integrity he exhibited is something we should all aspire to. It is ageless and priceless and knows no proprietor.

Thanks, Mr. Cronkite, for a job well done and a life well lived!

E-mail this: Bookmark this:

When it comes to online news content, Steve Brill believes “free” is idiotic …

So, is giving away online news and information for free the wave of the future … or just plain idiotic! The polemic continues with Steve Brill’s comments in this video interview with TheAtlantic.com’s Bob Cohn during the “Aspen Ideas Festival” at end-June …

Full disclosure … I’ve linked to this video at TheAtlantic.com for free! Which may or may not underscore Brill’s point … The video is available at TheAtlantic.com with Bob Cohn’s lead-in commentary, here.

E-mail this: Bookmark this:

From hack to flack? A few tips if you’re hoping to make the transition

I’ve had a couple of requests in recent weeks from print journalists recently laid off, thinking that they might like to enter the field of public relations and asking for any advice I might extend them.

I made the transition out of journalism a decade ago — bitten by the Internet bug, I left to manage online content at a B2B portal, then when the bottom fell out of the dot.com bubble did some quick lateral moves into tech/telecoms conferences (which I’ve since been happy to see dubbed “face-to-face” media, confirming my own belief that business conferences are just another media platform through which to communicate one’s message).

All this to say, my path from journalism into public relations was somewhat roundabout, so I’m not sure I’m the best guide for transitioning from “hack” to “flack.” But, here goes with a tip or two, in the hope that this may be of some help:

1. REDEFINE FOR YOURSELF WHAT IT IS THAT YOU DO
This is NOT the same as re-inventing yourself. As a journalist you have been a communicator — your strength is taking knowledge and information from others, synthesizing it, boiling it down and communicating the essence of it in clear, concise language that is more understandable to a general audience or community. You have in fact been a “communications professional” or a “media communications professional.” You are, in fact, continuing your communications career and want to extend the communications skills that you honed as a journalist into public relations work as much as adding a new set of PR skills to those you picked up in journalism.

2. THINK “MEDIA PLATFORMS”
You’ve been synthesizing information and communicating it to communities of readers of newspapers (and/or other print pubs, for that matter). Remember that newspapers are only one media platform through which this can be done. Social media and Web 2.0 are simply the latest technology-spawned media platform to come along. The new digital platform will not destroy the newspaper business or all print publications, nor will it destroy television and radio. All these platforms will continue to co-exist, to greater and lesser degree, and will feed off each other.

If you really consider yourself a communications professional and wish to continue in the business of communicating, then you must a) not feel threatened by any of these competing media platforms, and b) become conversation in the changes going on in all these media platforms. To keep your communications career going, learn everything you can about social networking, widgets, mashups, sharing, RSS, blogging, microblogging and much more. NOW!

3. YOU ALREADY KNOW A THING OR TWO ABOUT PUBLIC RELATIONS
Never underestimate what you’ve learned as a journalist and the degree to which that will positively inform your work in public relations. You know a lot of things that good PR people need to know: how journalists think and how newsrooms function; the time restrictions of deadlines and the space restrictions of a news hole; what goes into special sections and what makes the front page, what goes into the front of the book and what’s back-of-book material; when it’s likely to be a slow news day and when there’s so much breaking news that you couldn’t come up with a column inch for a feature story if it was commanded by the almighty, herself.

You’ve also been on the receiving end of so many lame PR pitches and poorly written news releases that you could spend hours running up a rather sizable bar tab talking about all the idiots in public relations agencies out there. But, you also know that from time to time you’ve received calls from a PR person who has actually read what you’ve written and understands the beat(s) or market or industry you cover. A PR person who can actually help you with a story you are writing … remember that and strive to become that PR person.

4. JETTISON ANY HOLDOVERS YOU MAY HAVE ABOUT PR BEING “THE DARK SIDE”
Don’t deny it! Many, many journalists have an aversion to public relations as somehow unclean, as being “the dark side” of communications. If you harbor feelings like this, do yourself a favor and find another profession into which to transition. Nobody wants to work in a profession and among people they loathe. It may pay the bills, but it’s bad for your mental health and well-being. If you’re not convinced that there are good PR people out there and that you want to become one of them, then look elsewhere for your new job.

5. YOUR STRENGTHS ARE ALSO YOUR WEAKNESS
You may know a lot about journalism and have a lot of contacts in newsrooms far and wide, but in the current economic climate those newsrooms are shrinking — which you already know and that’s the reason you’re considering a PR job. Your potential public relations employers know that, as well, and while they value your experience in PR they have to wonder if your value is shrinking as the media climate changes.

Don’t rest on your journalism laurels — you can honestly present yourself as someone with a “nose for news,” with loads of contacts in the news business and with excellent writing and editing skills. And emphasize the latter — good writing is still at a premium; all is not yet 142 characters or less! But, express your readiness to learn both about public relations in all its facets and all about new media platforms and how they’re being used to effectively communicate.

6. SPECIALIZE – PLAY TO YOUR SPECIFIC KNOWLEDGE
Unless you’ve relished being a general assignment reporter, you’ve likely accumulated a wealth of knowledge on a specific subject area as a beat reporter. If you know loads about healthcare, by all means seek out a PR agency that specializes in healthcare clients; if you covered government, look for jobs in public affairs PR; if you were a travel writer, try agencies that specialize in the hospitality and travel industry.

Your special knowledge means you can hit the ground running and even that a particular organization with an in-house PR position or agencies with clients in that market or industry may know of you and respect your work. Having that knowledge and contacts are real positives and can only help you in your job search.

These tips aren’t much, I know, but it’s what I can offer without spending too many hours over coffee or drinks detailing the ins-and-outs of my PR experience over the past several years. Good luck with your job search and here’s hoping if you do end up choosing public relations, it will prove to have been a happy and healthy choice for your career future!

E-mail this: Bookmark this:

“Right tool for the job” or “The medium is the message”

Given the rapidly changing landscape of media and media relations these days, if there were one piece of accumulated knowledge I could pass on to young PR practitioners — or young journalists, for that matter — it would be something along the lines of what my father told me decades ago, likely on one of those Saturday mornings out in the work shed at the back of our home: “Use the right tool for the job.”

In my media relations work, I’ve come over time to translate such advice to mean that one should use the appropriate media platform for communicating your message or that of your client — whether it’s to journalists or bloggers, it doesn’t much matter. There’s always a most appropriate media platform for communicating to a specific community. Of course, long before I figured that one out, Marshall McLuhan said it so succinctly with the phrase “The medium is the message,” meaning of course that the medium used invariably influences how the message is perceived.

As a journalist, I worked across multiple media platforms, writing sometimes in the morning about breaking news in a very brief, wire-service format; and covering it later that day in a longer newspaper piece, or even weaving the same news into a magazine feature with a longer deadline. The platforms were all very different and took into account their readership. But the lesson was simple, you would never file a 350-word breaking news story to a magazine editor, nor would you submit a 3,500 feature-length piece for a wire service editor. Right tool for the job!

In media relations, one would never submit a lengthy press release over a wire service to a TV news producer who may be sending out a camera team for an enterprise shoot for the evening news. Nor, these days, would one send to a blogger a social media-averse news release, that is, one that is not link-rich, with multimedia options, easy drop quotes, graphic images, bookmarking and social network sharing capabilities. Right tool for the job!

Increasingly, one also needs to pay close attention to the preferences of media practitioners — not just bloggers, but journalists as well — as to how they expect to be contacted. If they say on their voice mail to NEVER call them with a story pitch, you proceed to do so at your peril — and the possible peril of your client’s story. Some say only to contact them via e-mail (though we all know everybody’s email is packed with spam these days); others say only to contact them through social media; others say NEVER to contact them via social media. In all of these cases, it’s imperative that you use the right media platform to communicate with your targeted journalist or blogger.

In the ever-changing media world we live in, there is no substitute for following your journalists and bloggers across every media platform they use to disseminate news and information and to knowing precisely which media platform through which they prefer to receive communication from PR and media relations specialists. To ignore their preferences and use the wrong media platform sends them a very clear message, either that you don’t care about their instructions as to how to contact them or that you just “don’t get it” when it comes to the media in which they work … or both!

In media relations as in most things, you have first to be familiar with and then know when and how to use … and here I say it again, at the risk of sounding both pompous and redundant: The right tool for the job!

E-mail this: Bookmark this:

Arts & Letters Daily: ‘Best Website in the World’

Mr. Big thought he knew a lot about websites and about the Internet generally. So, it was a humbling experience to have been completely unaware of the existence for more than a decade of Arts & Letters Daily, until it was brought to my attention by the real intellectual and authority on all things ‘arts & letters’ in my family.

At the time, I was surprised to see that the site is published by The Chronicle of Higher Education, for which I wrote fairly extensively for a time on university and higher-ed happenings in Mexico and Central America. But, I digress …

I’m now even more surprised to read the history of the site on Wikipedia and to learn that it was founded way back in 1998, long before The Chronicle got involved, by one Denis Dutton, Los Angeles-born and New Zealand-resident professor of Philosophy, web entrepreneur and media commentator/activist of some reknown.

I can’t say enough good things about this site, which was named by the Sunday Observer in 1999 as “Best Website in the World.” I concur … and made it the home page of my default web browser some time ago, just to be able to see the latest every time I go to the net.

ALDaily.com has something for everyone interested in media, with breaking news stories at sites galore throughout the English-speaking world; plus synopses and links to the best of the best articles, book reviews, essays, literary and social criticism available in English across the web today. It’s full of everything that really matters to anyone who cares to occasionally step back from the fast-paced, consumption-driven madness of the world we inhabit and send an intelligent thought or reflection from one nerve synapse to another!

I think it may still be the ‘Best Website in the World’ …

E-mail this: Bookmark this:

Miami dot.com to Miami 2.0: What have we learned?

So, let’s start with a confession … I was the ‘Silicon Beach Buzz’ werewolf!

Yes, that’s right … moonlighting after hours back in late-1999 and early-2000, I put out a guerrilla e-newsletter that exploded virally as everyone jumped on the bandwagon (eventually, my good self included!) of the South Florida-based Internet startup phenomenon, comprised largely of Latin American and Spanish-language content portals for just about everything you can imagine — from finance to trade to health to women’s issues and music.

By end-2000, though, Silicon Beach was in serious trouble along with most other dot.com-era startup zones, from Silicon Valley to Austin, from Boston to San Diego to Raleigh-Durham and beyond. Those in South Florida tech who barely managed to stay afloat through the economic doldrums of 2001 were largely put to rest by 9/11 and the shock waves that sent throughout the U.S. economy.

I’ve returned to the somewhat painful reminiscence of less happy days for the South Florida dot.com boom & bust prompted by a coupla three things: one is Stuart Bruce’s reference to the “hype cycle” that accompanies new technologies, in his post about Twitter’s current location on the expectation curve; another is having just reviewed my post of last year at this time about Miami’s tech revival of a different kind in this era of Web 2.0; the other is a really insightful blog post by Jeremiah Owyang I spotted more than a year ago and kept archived, titled Commemorating the Idiocy of the Dot Com Era: Did we Repeat or Reform?

For anyone who wasn’t here, you might ask “Repeat what?” or “Reform What?” For myself, I’m thinking there appear to be quite a few lessons learned that have fortunately since seeped into the general tech and web community consciousness. But, I’d like to enlist the help of some of those who were here then and those who are here now to get their input and insight into exactly what we have learned from Miami dot.com to Web 2.0.

A quick bit of history: from 1998-2001, there appeared a plethora of dot.coms that were spread throughout South Beach and the Design District and up into Aventura, Broward and beyond. There were the notables StarMedia, Yupi.com, ElSitio.com and Patagon.com — whose CEO, Argentine Wenceslao Casares, managed a multi-million dollar sale to Spain’s Banco Santander just prior to the bubble’s burst, perhaps the only truly successful execution of a financial exit for any of the Silicon Beach startups.

But there were many, many more … I left journalism to manage online content at 1hemisphere.com, a b2b e-commerce portal promoting cross-border trade between small- to mid-sized enterprises throughout the Americas. Talk about an idea whose time had/has not yet come!!

For anyone wanting to search the history, still out there is a graveyard of press releases and announcements that read like so many epitaphs on tombstones: partnerships, product releases, closed rounds of funding; even the occasional NYTimes story about a phenomenon that appeared to be promising, yet would soon run out of gas before getting off the runway.

Perhaps the best litany of Miami dot.com startups that literally “went South” can be found in a Hispanic Business magazine article in January 2001 — though I caution if you’re going to read that piece that never, ever did I hear anyone call what was happening here “Silicon Playa.” (Hey, I was Silicon Beach Buzz! so I know … and anyway, that would be like calling the Bay Area “Frisco” … but I digress.) And, David Adams filed a creditable piece for the St. Pete Times months earlier.

When all is said and done, the real question for me from Miami dot.com to Miami 2.0 is … “What have we learned?” Why is it different this time around? What have we taken from that earlier experience of the “static web” and VCs-gone-wild to the current “live web” era and the Web 2.0-driven technology scene that has been developing for awhile now in South Florida.

The past of Miami dot.com is well known. The future of Miami 2.0 is yours to write. Looking forward to your reminiscences, insight and comments!

E-mail this: Bookmark this:

Stuart Bruce, Twitter and the ‘peak of inflated expectation’

Love this graphic from Stuart Bruce, the Gartner Hype Cycle, pointing out how Twitter and micro-blogging are presently “at the peak of inflated expectation,” as were Facebook, Second Life, blogs and e-Commerce previously.

Also like what Stuart calls the “slope of enlightenment,” evidently that second wave of more rational expectation of the true value of these new technologies and platforms. The value in Twitter is clearly there, as is the value in Facebook and other social media platforms.

But, the hype is just way beyond rationality for Twitter at its current “peak of inflated expectation.” Soon, we’ll return to a more reasoned appreciation … and then we’ll hit the next peak!

E-mail this: Bookmark this:

News Flash: the Internet did NOT, repeat NOT, kill journalism as we knew it

Anybody get a chance to see David Simon’s National Press Club luncheon speech last week? Brilliant! Check it out … here.

Simon, the creator of HBO’s “The Wire” and former Baltimore Sun reporter, has been seen and heard a lot lately and there is lots of YouTube video of him on Bill Moyers Journal, Real Time with Bill Maher, speaking at Loyola College, USC Law School, testifying before the U.S. Senate (in a controversial appearance with Ariana Huffington) about the future of U.S. Newspapers …

I caught his luncheon speech at the National Press Club on Monday June 8th via C-Span and … it’s riveting. It asserts what some of us have been saying all along … it’s been the full-scale capitulation of management to the short-term, balance-sheet dictates of Wall Street equity analysts that’s really bludgeoned the newspaper industry over the past 20 years or so. The rise of new technology is a straw dog argument.

Simon is much more articulate on this than I’ve ever been … it’s longish, but skip through the intros on this video and go right to his speech. It’s well worth it!

E-mail this: Bookmark this: