Why aren’t PR Pros using Viral Video?

Bulldog Reporter, which is one of the best publications/websites serving the public relations community, today published my opinion piece on viral video. They did an awesome job of editing it and presenting it. Hats off to them.

Online advertising overtakes print in Britain

The Guardian reports that online advertising now exceeds newspaper advertising in the UK. This in a country that has about 15 national daily newspapers and is addicted to its tabloids. Broadcast advertising is in a clear downward trend. Is this a leading indicator for the U.S.?

Meanwhile, newspaper editors fiddle while Rome burns.

Tech PR War Stories Episode 2 is live

The second episode of Tech PR War Stories is live.

David joins us this week from a Microsoft developer’s conference. Some attendees are complaining about how Microsoft treats them, and they’re blogging openly about it. Paul and David discuss the issue of openness and the emerging PR paradigm of embracing the bad with the good. What’s important is the conversation, they agree, not controlling the message.

Thanks for all your comments. Please keep ‘em coming!

Yahoo to Offer Unlimited E-Mail Storage – washingtonpost.com

Yahoo will lift the cap on e-mail storage. David Filo tells the Washington Post, “We are giving them no reason to ever have to delete old e-mails.”

I’ve worked with people who kept thousands of e-mails in their inbox. I always wondered how they could manage such chaos. I guess I was the misguided one. It was just a matter of waiting for technology to catch up with their organization style .

Is Exchange vulnerable to open source?

When I saw the news nugget about Yankee Group’s forecast that 23% of Microsoft Exchange users may defect to open source, I had an inkling of who was behind it. Sure ’nuff, it’s my dear friend Laura DiDio, who is never one to shy away from controversy. Laura’s taken more than her share of bashing from the various vendors she’s criticized over the years, and some people question her research methods. But I admire the way she stirs things up and gets people talking. If more Exchange users begin to examine open-source alternatives after reading this report, so much the better.

An impressive meetup for The Strategy Paradox

You know social media is mainstream when the big accounting firms get on the bandwagon.

This evening I attended a meetup for Michael E. Raynor, author of the new book, The Strategy Paradox. I learned of it from HeyLetsGo, a regional social network. I wanted to meet Raynor since he co-authored one of my favorite business books, The Innovator’s Dilemma and his new topic sounded like it might make interesting fodder for a blog I write on innovation.

It turned out, though, that the social-media aspect of the meetup was as interesting as the author. The event was an experiment for Deloitte. Held in a small upscale restaurant in downtown Boston, it had no guest list. Anyone who showed up was free to attend (and with open bar and a fine selection of hors d’oeuvres, it was a bounty for those who did). Promotion was through an announcement on PBWiki and news of the event spread entirely through word of mouth. Mark Doerschlag posted the notice on his MarksGuide.com, a blog devoted to professional networking, posted the notice on HeyLetsGo, which is how I learned of it. Anyone could have come: in that respect, it was quite different from the tightly controlled press events of yesteryear.

Deloitte reps delivered a short presentation highlighting the experimental nature of the event. There were no attempts to sell the company’s services. Everyone got a free copy of the book. I’d say there were about 30-40 people there.

I found the audience to be of surprisingly high quality, given the lack of restrictions on attendance. In addition to spending some quality time with the author, I spoke with several other attendees whom I had never met before. All were business professionals with a strong interest in social media and in the strategy-focused topic of the book. It happened that nearly everyone I spoke to was self-employed. Several appeared interested in the networking aspects of the event. All were bright and inquisitive and the type of people who will probably blog about the book.

I don’t know if this meetup will ultimately prove successful in promoting the book, but I was impressed with both the attendees and the discussion. I’ll certainly be looking at applying this idea to marketing my own book, which is due next month. For an event with so few restrictions, I thought it was a notable success and a testament to the power of word-of-mouth marketing.

Tech PR War Stories

David Strom and I got together at the recent New Communications Forum in Las Vegas to catch up on things. We’ve both been around the tech media business for a very long time, and while we’ve never worked for the same company at the same time, we’ve got plenty of mutual friends and experiences.

David came up with the idea of creating a podcast for the public relations community that would communicate what we’ve learned about the best and worst of PR. Both he and I have been on many panels in front of PR professionals, talking about how to work with the media. The appetite for this kind of information seems to be insatiable, and a podcast is a quick and easy way to capture some of our experiences.

So this week we recorded the first episode of Tech PR War Stories. Each week, we’ll get together and talk about some aspect of technology media, whether it’s news, tips, advice, rants or reminiscences.

We’re really going to try to update this one every week, which sounds like an impossible dream to me. However, David has been publishing his Web Informant newsletter every week for many years, so I guess where there’s a will, there’s a way.

Please listen to the inaugural program (it’s only 14 minutes) and let me know what you think. If you have iTunes, you can find it here. This is a work in progress and we want to make sure the programs meet your needs. We’re pretty much open to anything!

My E*TRADE tale: how NOT to treat the customer

Financial institutions are known for treating their customers like cattle, but my recent experience with the E*TRADE brokerage has me envying the cows.

I use E*TRADE as a backup to my bank, occasionally transferring money into the brokerage for investment. Often these sums are pretty large. The transfers have always been smooth in the past, but when I tried to move a fairly large sum out of E*TRADE and back to my bank two weeks ago, the transaction didn’t go through.

The trouble was that the system didn’t tell me that the time (although E*TRADE claims it did). It simply made my accounts disappear. So when I noticed a week later that the transfer had never gone through, I went online to look at my accounts. They were gone. All of them.

I stayed calm, and called the brokerage, which told me to call back in the morning. When I called today, I was told that the accounts had been frozen as a security measure and that I had to go through an identity verification process to make the transfer. Okay, that’s reasonable, but why hadn’t anyone called me when I initiated the transaction 10 days earlier?

They did, on March 13, I was told, and they left a message. Really? I never got that message. And I wonder why they left one message in nine days ago and didn’t bother to follow up when I didn’t return it? It doesn’t sound like they were all that keen on getting to the bottom of the story. Well, they tried to reach me, I was told.

What number did they use, I asked? I was read an old work number and I hadn’t used in about five years. Did anyone notice that the voice mail that answered the phone didn’t identify themselves as me, I asked? They didn’t have an answer for that.

I’ve been making large transfers like this for years, I said, and I’ve never been run through this gauntlet. I was told that it’s a new policy to confirm all large transfers. Really, I asked? No one at either E*TRADE or my bank asked any questions when I transferred an even larger amount of money into the account a few weeks earlier. So it’s only suspicious when you transfer money out, I guess.

By the way, I’m still waiting on some paperwork that the E*TRADE rep was supposed to send me on another issue seven months ago. It doesn’t really matter. By the time I get the paperwork, I’ll be with another brokerage.

IBM offers fascinating insight on evolving media world

A perceptive analysis of the evolving media world comes from IBM, of all places. A 36-page report by IBM Global Business services that was recently posted on IBM’s site foresees the media market falling into four basic classifications (with compound annual growth rates through 2010):

Traditional media (5%) – The model most media companies use today.
Walled communities (10%) – A combination of professional- and user-generated content delivered to a limited number of subscribers who either pay a fee or part with information about themselves to gain access.
Content hyper-syndication (33%) – Proprietary content is delivered through many channels, often in exchange for a license fee.
New platform aggregation (16) – Collection and packaging of content that is primarily user-generated.

By 2010, traditional media will be a $340 billion, market, with walled communities reaching $240 billion, content hyper-syndication $25 billion and new platform aggregation $50 billion.

So market growth has clearly shifted toward sectors that combine user and professionally generated content. As the report notes, five of the 10 fastest-growing websites last year were CGM aggregators.

Other interesting sound bites: “Worldwide revenue from new media channels – such as Internet advertising, mobile music and online games – is expected to reach nearly US$55 billion in 2006. But that pales in comparison to the US$455 billion in revenue that traditional channels are expected to yield in 2006.”

“According to a recent [Forrester Research] study, if advertisers had an additional US$1 million for marketing, 50 percent of them said they’d spend it on Internet search, 42 percent chose other forms of Internet advertising, but only 19 percent mentioned television.”

The report concludes with 10 recommendations for media companies, such as bringing consumers more directly into the content development process and loosening up on ownership rules in order to gain share.

The forecast of 33% CAGR in content hyper-syndication surprised me, as did the predicted $240 billion size of that market just three years from now. It suggests that Viacom, Sony and other digital-rights management flag-wavers are shooting themselves in the foot when they try to rein in file-sharing services. The recording industry is learning a consumer education campaign is far more effective than lawsuits in turning music downloaders into informed, paying customers. Part of hyper-syndication is giving a little away in order to get new customers on the back end.

This report is well worth reading if you’re interested in the future of media.

Wikibon is a great idea

David Vellante has some ideas about revolutionizing IT market research. A former senior vice president at research firm International Data Corp., Dave’s been running Barometrix, a successful startup focused on ROI measurement for several years. But here’s the new idea: a couple of months ago, Barometrix spun out Wikibon, a company that’s trying to apply wiki technology to market research.

The idea is to develop a rich research resource based upon contributions from knowledgeable people that are assembled and edited in a wiki. the first topic is information storage, but the goal is to apply this idea to other IT markets as well.

What makes this very Web 2.0-ish the idea of building a research product from content that is contributed for free. Research companies have always placed a premium on their ideas, and charged handsomely for it. Wikibon assumes that there are a lot of smart people out there who would be grateful just for the recognition. That is a fundamental Web 2.0: the assumption that good information doesn’t have to be expensive.

Dave’s competitors will no doubt hate this experiment, because they dislike anything that undermines their value proposition. But I think this is a heckuva good idea, and I’ll be eager to see how it turns out.