Will 2010 be the ‘Year of the App’? Barcelona may hold the key …

I have this gnawing feeling that 2010 could be mobility’s ‘Year of the App’. Maybe I’ve heard/read this somewhere already and it stuck in the recesses of my memory, or maybe it’s just a “gut” feeling, as the “gnawing” part would seem to indicate …

Way I’m figuring it, the very best place to investigate this possibility may well be at the Mobile World Congress’s co-located App Planet event in Barcelona. And, investigation it clearly needed, as we’ve heard so many times before that mobile apps are on the verge of “really taking off”.

News flash, in case you haven’t heard: mobile apps and app stores were not spawned by Steve Jobs and the iPhone and the notion that this year could be THE year that apps really take off among users has been floated maybe, what, a gazillion times over the past five or six years? Just to take smartphone market-leader Nokia’s pioneering, albeit less-than-successful, efforts as unfortunate examples: Anyone remember “Preminet”? How about “Discoverer”? What about “Download”? All less-than-successful predecessors of Nokia’s current Ovi Store, in case you weren’t aware.

Something different IS in the air this year, however. No, it’s not the iPhone, clearly deserving of the 2007 “Invention of the Year” designation and mobile disruptor par-excellence of the late-Noughties … The difference in the equation that could make 2010 the “Year of the App,” I think, just may be Android — and more importantly than the open operating system, it’s the Android biz model’s emulation of the Nokia/Symbian licensing model, which has made the Finnish handset-maker the envy and takedown target of every mobile hardware and software vendor to emerge over the past two decades.

Built on the Linux kernel and released to the open-source community by Google under the Apache License, distribution of the Android OS as announced in 2007 through the 47-member Open Handset Alliance clearly differentiated Android from iPhone and set it out on a path more clearly emulating the Nokia/Symbian partnership for distribution and licensing of Nokia mobile platforms on the Symbian OS to various handset manufacturers.

As a result, there are today reportedly as many as 18-20 Android-based mobile devices either in the market or about to be launched by eight or nine different manufacturers. And this week Google unveiled its own-brand ‘Nexus One’ touchscreen smartphone based on the Android 2.1 operating system.

Add to that the rapid growth of available Android apps – from roughly 5,000 in May to 10,000 by September and north of 24,000 in December – and you have what seems to me to be a scenario in which the first-stage skyrocketing of mobile apps availability via Apple’s iStore may take on an entirely new dimension through Android Market.

I’ve long been a news junkie and may always be one, so as small-screen news delivery assumes growing importance in our increasingly mobile world, I’ll be particularly interested in watching the trend of news apps for the new mobile platform.

Already, validating the Android platform for delivery of news and information, we’ve seen Android apps launched by USA Today, NPR and Associated Press – first out with mobile app for the iPhone, closely followed by a mobile widget app for the Nokia N97 touchscreen device – and there’s also an Android Reuters widget for pulling down the wire service’s headlines to home screen of Android-based devices. Next up may well be UK-based news organizations, as Vodafone announced at Google’s Nexus One launch in Mt. View that it will be the first UK operator offering the Google Android device, which it is expected to unveil to the public during Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

Vodafone is a sponsor of the new App Planet event at MWC this year, btw, with RIM and Symbian OS licensee Sony Ericsson are “conference partners.” Conspicuously absent are Apple – though not surprisingly, since Apple refuses to see itself as part of the mobile industry – and Nokia, for the first time in MWC’s history a no-show at the world’s premier mobile event.

So could 2010 be the long-awaited ‘Year of the App’? What happens in Barcelona doesn’t stay in Barcelona, thankfully, so any impact on the future of mobile applications that expected news announcements at MWC may have will surely be known immediately … and doubtless downloaded in real time to mobile phone screens worldwide!

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My favorite Facebook spoofs … some mirth for the holiday season!

There is a lot I like about Facebook and from a technology standpoint the open API that lets third party developers come up with apps is a strong point. I know organizations can and are leveraging Facebook to reach out to communities of interest and I’ve seen first-hand the utility of Facebook groups in promoting activities within a certain online demographic.

But, oh are there things I find irksome about Facebook. And, this video forwarded to me by my mate Paul sums it all up brilliantly. And, it’s been out and about for more than a year now … where was I that I didn’t see this before! It now ranks far and away my favorite among online spoofs of Facebook:

A distant second favorite of online Facebook spoofs is Lonerbook … a bit more subtle and still worth a chuckle, or smirk!

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Info still wants to be ‘free’, or is it ‘expensive’ … twenty-five years on!

Interesting conversation about media and institutions and free versus premium content here in London the other night with Jonathan Allen, co-founder of Moblog and self-taught search wunderkind (soon to take over editorial reins of Search Engine Watch, so I understand).

Like so many others, both of us are seeing what may be a pendulum swing occurring, toward the re-valuing of premium content. And, it’s not just the recent Rupert Murdoch rejoinders in that regard, nor the Associated Press indication that non-paying online search access to stories will soon be delayed (effectively turning paying subscribers into recipients of ‘premium’ content).

Jonathan expresses the wish that the free vs premium content wrangling can be sorted out before the dominance of free content does in some of society’s more treasured institutions, newspapers and museums came to mind. And it’s true, over the past how many years, the natural constituencies/communities of such valued institutions are becoming increasingly atomized throughout the ‘long tail’ of free content and entertainment available over digital media platforms.

As an aside, the one thing that never ceases to amaze me in all the discussion over free vs premium content is the way in which a collective amnesia has evolved over the past 25 years, allowing the phrase “information wants to be free” to have been completely hijacked by the evangelists and successful marketing efforts of the “free content” movement.

For those too young to recall, it was THE mantra (or, at least, one of the main mantras) of the dot-com era. And, this conveniently simplistic version of the thought first uttered by web visionary Stewart Brand, still permeates and dominates much of the discussion around free versus premium content today.

Brand originally wrote, in the Whole Earth Review in May 1985, that “Information Wants To Be Free. Information also wants to be expensive. … That tension will not go away.” He apparently first uttered the expression in slightly different form at the first Hackers Conference a year earlier, according to Wikipedia.

Twenty five years on, information wants to be expensive and it also wants to be free. And, we’re still trying to figure it out, hopefully sooner rather than later.

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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.

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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!

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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!

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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.

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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!

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“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!

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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’ …

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