Engage in PR

Looks like Edelman got a big win with this CA relationship. Exciting to see another major software player look toward social comms, and blogging specifically, as a PR vehicle. CA is behind the eight ball in their sector however with BMC’s community site and IBM’s many blog initiatives (here’s one I like).

Edelman is certainly far ahead of all other agencies when it comes to blogging, and they certainly have the resources to do it all. And their recent relationship with Technorati only proves what they are going to be able to provide to the rest of the world.

Some companies are going to get this blogging thing quickly, and help build their businesses from it…just look at what Novell is doing with blogging for PR and their CTO’s blog.

In full disclosure I work with the Novell team here at Horn Group and we have found the blogs to be a terrific vehicle for different messages with the ability to directly talk with journalists. Often times we will use a blog posting to feed journalists information about a topic, like today’s blog from Novell CTO Jeff Jaffe on Identity Management. His post is in depth, nearly an article itself, but it is authentic.

ASIDE: Anyone have a good place to store images so that I can use it as an image source for these posts? Thanks!!

Article in today’s Boston Globe talks about Joe DiPesa, owner of a window company in Massachusetts, the pics show him dressing up in various costumes including Superman.

DiPesa, owner of Windows America in Hanover, realized last fall that in this challenging retail economy he needed to somehow draw more customers to his store. So he began a Monday morning ritual of dressing in costume and bouncing up and down on a trampoline for two hours outside his building, in rain, snow, or shine.

DiPesa says that 5-8% of his sales can be traced back to his ‘gonzo marketing’ techniques, and he only does it on Monday mornings! Love the fact that as crazy as this guy seems, at the end of the day the activities he undertakes need to relate directly back to his business.

Small business owners are often times the smartest business leaders b/c of the personal liability and responsibility that they have for the company. That makes them look beyond traditional means of communicating as a necessity…and in DiPesa’s case it has led to a feature article in a major national daily.

That is what I call Gonzo PR….

Thursday I moaned about PR 2.0, but today, after listening to Sam Whitmore’s podcast and looking towards a three-day weekend, it hit me how key it is to have ‘Open Source PR’. It stems from this conversation we’ve been having about social communications and the new ability to create a site where people can not only take, but give.

Shouldn’t PR be the same? This is not about pushing information to people, it is creating a dialog with people. That is again why I think that the whole press release format is just plain wrong for journalists, but it can be really useful for other constituencies when done correctly.

For example, client of ours is going to be putting out some news on June 5th…as usual we are pre-briefing the week before and using good story pitches with the press. So what do you do with the release? You make it a lead gen factory, a user information release.

I. Headline
II. Sub-Head
III. Paragraph
IV. Call to Action

The call to action is a web site (maybe it’s a corporate one, if you’re advanced it’s a social comms site) chock full of product demos, customer references, analyst references, buying info, blogs, and more. Allow those interested to play around a bit, talk to experts….ENGAGE.

Open Source PR….I like the sound of that.

Guess I’m just not sold on this whole Web 2.0 ‘thing’. To me it reeks of heavy marketing-make-up for some of the same old ideas…lipstick on a pig? I’m completely on the horse for social communications and love the way the Web can be used to involve human interaction, hell I wouldn’t have started a blog right?

Here’s the key though; the more popular these become, the more money that is thrown at these companies, and greater the risk becomes for eventual failure. Check out Nick Carr’s thoughts on this topic here. I think he hits the nail right on the head.

For the PR community there is of course the offshoot of ‘PR 2.0′…come on! Do we really need to spin the fact that what we are doing is broken? Calling it something different doesn’t MAKE IT DIFFERENT!

Example…lot’s of talk about SHIFT’s new Social Media Press Release template, and let me be another person to applaud the team’s ingenuity and creativity with this template. Do yourself a favor and really spend some time with the template, it really is cool. And the folks at SHIFT are the first to admit that this is a work in progress. Here is my problem…I just think we need a completely different way to communicate with press, without forgetting the means in which to communicate with customers, partners, investors, etc.

Currently we are working on the User Information Release format discussed here in this blog. At the same time we are also formulating some thoughts around how to better communicate with press instead of the non-effective release over the wire.

I think Kevin Dugan at The Bad Pitch Blog said it best:

The Bad Pitch blog is all for improving old tools by blending them with new ones. But if your writing sucks or you are not writing about news, no format will save you from the dustbin (or from a blog post calling you out in front of your peers for that matter).

I can’t remember the last time I secured a stellar story by sending a press release, can you? So, is coming up with a name like PR 2.0 or coming up with a new press release template akin to sticking lipstick on a pig?

The AP had a story by Dan Goodin about three hours ago that really encapsulated the day in the identity management space. Yet again identities had been stolen (26.5 million veterans to be exact) because someone simply made a stupid mistake; again, and again, and again.

When will companies begin to curtail on employee’s rights to bring data with them, especially in a world of USB drives, PDAs, and laptops? And when they do, will they be ok with the tremendous loss of productivity?

On that subject, many companies are already taking issues into their own hands by restricting web access, eliminating IM, prohibiting downloads, and more. Do these result in limited productivity? Perhaps, but they certainly result in less than enthused employees.

What’s the right answer…in my opinion companies need to do a better job of protecting large amounts of identities from ever being able to be taken off of the property. With a proper Identity Management (IdM) set up, including provisioning and user access rules this employee would not have been able to take this type of information off of a server and onto his laptop.

Honestly it is not that difficult…and the scary thing is, it is being overlooked at the dawn of ‘Web 2.0′.