Surely the Syndicate NYC highlight for me was getting to meet & talk with David Weinberger, our foremost philosopher of connection. David is the sharp, funny blogger at the Journal of Hyperlinked Organization (JOHO to you & me), author of Small Pieces, Loosely Joined, and, oh yeah, he helped write this little thing called the Cluetrain Manifesto. We talked about his new project, Everything Is Miscellaneous, and a bit about how Cluetrain has fared over the years.
Listen to the podcast:
Super stoked to be speaking at WebVisions 2006 in Portland this July. Not only are there going to be rockstar speakers I’m looking forward to talking with (like our pal Dan Cederholm, MeFi man Matt Haughey, Matt Mullenweg, Derek Powazek, Andy Baio, Tom Vander Wal and, many, many more), but it’s in Portland, a place I love. (Early bird admission is super cheap — only $125 through June 30.)
Kit Seeborg has put together a great panel: Let Go, Jump In: Community Marketing Strategies for Empowered Customers. The lineup: me, Kit, Dan Saffer of Adaptive Path, and Jeremiah Owyang, social media evangelist from Hitachi. Awesome.
Learn more about WebVisions 2006. Check out the show blog.
(L to R: Josh Hallett, Mike Manuel, Dave Coustan)
I got some of the PR 2.0 gang back together while we were at Syndicate NYC last week. David Parmet, Mike Manuel, Josh Hallett and I were joined by Joel Richman of PAN Communications. We talked about the lack of PR folks at the Syndicate show, about the Chevy ‘roll your own ad’ campaign, Amanda Congdon, and much, much more. We can’t help ourselves. We like to chat.
Listen to the podcast:
Technorati Tags: brian oberkirch, david parmet, hyku, joel+richman, josh hallett, mike+manuel, PAN+communications, pr2.0, syndicate, syndicate06, syndicatenyc, voce+communications, Weblogs+Work, Weblogs+Worknotes
Unlike a number of my colleagues, I can’t get that excited about Shift’s attempt to remake the press release format. Are press releases lame? Sure. Do PR pros need to change their way of thinking? Sure. (That’s one of the things we’ve been preaching @ Ketchum and lots of other places lately.)
That said, this template is a distinction without a difference. Social media is about connection, not content. If you take the same-old corpspeak and put it into a sexier format (“The kids are using the Digg, make sure our ‘news’ is Diggable.”), you haven’t done much. In no way are you availing yourself of the real power of social media. Didn’t one of the newswires bake in delicious support for their material recently? Again, glad that you are aware of the aggregators that are going to render your distribution channel inefficient & therefore null, but you still haven’t done much in trying to hijack delicious.
Instead of making clients feel like they are doing social media by tarting up their message points and pushing it out via other channels, how about:
- Having them actually read & track blogs.
- Actually participate in the communities that matter to their business.
- Banish the media relations mindset from their approach (along with the odious ‘blogger relations’) and instead start genuine conversations with media, developers, customers, etc.
- Take a truly niched approach and actually use the range of tools available to work the edges.
- Teaching clients the value and potential of syndication (which Shift could demonstrate by offering RSS feeds of its own press material).
We are stoked that the discussion is headed in this direction. We think that media outlets and PR shops alike have to do much more than merely add cosmetic changes to stay relevant.
Follow more of the conversation here & here.
I’m giving a few talks on social media at Ketchum today, thanks to an invite from my pal Jon Paul Buchmeyer. An hour long Web Ex, then a lunch chat with the brand group there. I believe David Parmet will be joining me as well.
While you could always read Peterme, JJG, Monstro, Odannyboy or other blogs by the wunderkinder @ Adaptive Path, now they have a new group blog. Can you say subscribed? Oh. Yeah. Baby.
At Syndicate, Jen Consalvo is talking about how the new offering AIM pages bakes in microformat support. Perhaps they will be interested in helping us advance the discussion and take up of hResume.
Steve Gillmor says the truck is already half-way over Newsvine CEO Mike Davidson, who he calls a ‘pinhead’ re: Davidson’s views on partial text feeds.
