A press page is a place for you to put all the info a reporter needs about you, your company, your product and your news. It's not the whole story; it's just the colorful details. But you'd be amazed at how hard it is to find that stuff sometimes. Jones-Dilworth has a wealth of experience, it has worked with reporters, and Totem reflects all the right priorities. If you want to make a good impression on the press, this is the way to go.

Here's an example. This is the press page for Totem itself.

The front page includes the basic gist, links to social feeds, and all the video and image resources a reporter will need to grab. There's a separate page for full team bios. The press contact is always in the upper right corner, because that's the person a reporter needs to get to quickly if something is wrong or missing.

The right side also features a few feeds to keep things fresh, such as company press releases and featured blog posts. It also has a ticker of recent articles, which can be viewed in full on the articles page.

The back end of Totem lets moderators input stories there, but there's also a browser bookmarklet that lets you add new articles with one click as you find them online.

Have you noticed those nice rows of publication logos at the bottom of start-ups' websites highlighting good coverage? Totem lets you easily create one of those and embed it on your site, linking to these articles.

Business depends upon good storytelling. The press (yours truly) is the filter through which the stories get to the public. If you want to tell the public your story, you have to get through us. But lest this sound self-important, let me tell you, we're lazy, frantic people. If you can make that story easier for us, we're much more likely to tell it.

I saw the Totem-built press page for Parse.ly before I knew what it was, and believe me, I noticed it. I spend so much time in Google Image Search looking for the least-crappy logo I can find. This time, there was just one link, and there I found everything I needed laid out exactly where I wanted it. If your boss needs more evidence that this is really worth doing for reporters, this is me saying, "Yes."

Check out Totem at totemapp.com.

So, against that backdrop we got a little suspicious when Lowe, just ahead of a Thursday appearance on the Ellen Degeneres show and the Saturday premiere of a Lifetime movie he's starring in, tweeted that Indianapolis Colts quarterback Peyton Manning was going to retire after missing the entire 2011 season.

Sure, Manning and Lowe share the same Hollywood agency, and sure, @RobLowe was the first account Colts owner Jim Irsay followed when he signed up for Twitter. But how did ESPN and the rest of the sports media not see this for what it was: a well-timed public relations stunt?

Manning has been quiet on the retirement rumors so far, but his father Archie, older brother Cooper and agent have all said the series of tweets Lowe sent out Wednesday are unfounded. The tweets started going out around noon pacific time, just in time to fuel east coast drive-time sports talk radio.

"So I was tweeting that I heard this might be in the offing and then you learn the power of Twitter. That's a powerful, powerful medium," Lowe told DeGeneres in a show that was taped Wednesday afternoon.

Powerful enough to help save "Drew Peterson: Untouchable," starring Lowe as the Illinois cop accused of killing his third and fourth wives? The trailer of the movie has already gone viral, but not because of its commanding performances: Vulture said it was "so startlingly ultracampy that it may only be safe to watch through a pinhole, much as one would witness a solar eclipse." Peterson himself reportedly said it was "hilarious" when his attorney played it for him over the phone.

Indianapolis fans, however, weren't taking any chances and immediately began speculating about the depth of the friendship between the former West Wing star and Irsay, and linked to photos of the two to give weight to his footbal authority. Lowe told DeGeneres he hoped "against hope" that it wasn't true but refused to say where he got his information.

"Ellen, I could tell you but then I'd have to kill you."

"Don't do it. I have a birthday coming up," DeGeneres said

Commenting Guidelines

These are spot on. Short and written in real language, these guidelines don't go into many details but paint a picture of what they want their community page to contain. They even take time to promote their brand here by reminding people that "treating each other with dignity and respect is part of (their) mission." Well done!

We know we aren't perfect and sometimes you may be upset with us. We do not plan on removing your comment unless it includes vulgarity, racial comments, personal attacks an associate or customer, is a third-party solicitation, or goes against Facebook's terms and conditions. Anything contrary to our company values may be removed.

Employee Social Guidelines

Attached to employee pay stubs last week, according to Mark Wilhelm, their social media guidelines (image) are short, but cover the basics. They don't specifically tell employees not to speak negatively about Publix but they do remind them to think before they comment. "If you would not say something at work in front of a customer, it is probably best not to say it online." For questions, employees are pointed towards the Media section in their handbook and to a full social media guidelines document on their internal website.

Answering Tough Questions

They could lighten up a bit on the PR-speak, but they're answering even the tough questions. This one that would have gone unanswered on most brand's pages gets an syrupy, but honest, answer.

Apparently they're not looking at all to Twitter for community outreach because their Twitter account is still private and appears to be a placeholder. It appears that they're focusing fully on Facebook now, which makes sense considering their target audience. According to Abisay Hererra, who manages a Facebook page in the grocery industry, brand loyalty is very strong in the grocery sector. He pointed out that groceries are purchased often and are a necessity, so getting someone to choose your store over competitors is important. He did wonder though, why was Publix so late to the game?

Whether the relationship you have with your grocery store is good or bad, it very much affects your purchasing decision and has direct impact to the bottom line. The potential to show real social media ROI here is huge.

Tip to Michelle LeBlanc for pointing this out in the Social Media and Community 2.0 Group on Linkedin.

The campaign was uncovered on May 3, when blogger Chris Soghoian posted emails he had received from BM's John Mercurio. "I wanted to gauge your interest in authoring an op-ed this week for a top-tier media outlet on an important issue that I know you're following closely," Mercurio wrote.

Soghoian asked who was paying BM, but was rebuffed. He declined to pursue the opportunity.

The PR campaign had been fairly extensive, according to USA Today. The campaign was "about how an obscure Google Gmail feature --Social Circle-- ostensibly tramples the privacy of millions of Americans and violates federal fair trade rules."

(Read our coverage of Circles.)

Google has recently been knocked back on its heels due to a raid of its offices in Seoul, South Korean and facing a U.S. Senate hearing about location-tracking in its Android phones.

According to the Daily Beast:

"Confronted with evidence, a Facebook spokesman last night confirmed that Facebook hired Burson, citing two reasons: first, it believes Google is doing some things in social networking that raise privacy concerns; second, and perhaps more important, Facebook resents Google's attempts to use Facebook data in its own social-networking service."

To say that Facebook accusing Google of mishandling privacy issues is hypocritical would be an understatement. (Along the lines of Baby Face Nelson accusing John Dillinger of a lax attitude toward firearm safety.) The opposite would be equally true.

In jabbing at the motes in each other's eyes, both companies have clearly gone blind.

Other sources: Boingboing

However, the focus is primarily on connecting the PR industry with journalists who want to hear about their clients' products and services. This relationship, as it stands today, is strained. PR companies often adopt the "spray-and-pray" approach to getting their messages out - that is, mass emails to large distribution lists of which only a handful of recipients may be genuinely interested in the news.

Wouldn't it be better to connect those PR folks directly to the writers receptive to the news without annoying hundreds of others in the process?

NewsBasis is the brainchild of Darryl Siry, a freelance writer for Wired and, formerly, a marketing and sales exec at Tesla Motors.

With NewsBasis, his goal is to create an online marketplace where media organizations are matched up with other businesses that could help provide not just raw news, but could also serve as authoritative sources for more in-depth articles. More importantly, perhaps, is that it aims to connect the two in relevant ways.

"I think its easy for journalists to oversimplify the problem and just complain about 'PR flacks,' but I see the problem as a design issue," Siry explains via blog post. "Companies very much want to get their message out, and they spend a lot to do this. It is just that the mechanisms that exist today are still relatively clumsy in that they don't align the interests or business processes of both sides very effectively."

New Twist on an Old Idea

The idea of linking up PR to journos more effectively isn't entirely new. Peter Shankman's competing service Help a Reporter Out (aka HARO) does much of the same thing today.

But what is new is the way the different parties connect. While on HARO, a journalist submits a question and receives email responses, NewsBasis offers a far more robust platform. At launch time, it will include a "request a response" feature similar to HARO's, but will also offer a tool called "embedded point of views."

In NewsBasis, journalists can search for articles on a particular subject from a real-time news stream of over 10,000 credible sources and create alerts on topics of interest. After selecting an article to read in NewsBasis, a sidebar appears to the right of the screen featuring these "embedded point of views" offered by other NewsBasis members. It's like Google SideWiki just for journos or blog comments without the trolls.

Here, the point of views may offer additional information or clarify misleading information found in the article, all from sources whose credentials can help back up their statements.

Of course, some PR agencies will probably figure out how to spam these "point of views" sidebars, too, but at least then the comments will be obvious, unlike the shady missives appearing on blog posts where PR staff members pretend to be end users who really really like that new service a journalist just wrote about.

From this "point of views" sidebar, journalists can then reach out to those adding their insight and request a direct follow-up.

Sources Search Engine

NewsBasis also offers a "sources" search engine. Here, journalists can search the profiles and points of views for those who may have answers and information relating to a story a journalist is working on.

These features go far beyond what HARO or any other competing service offers today. And it makes it easier and faster for journalists to research and produce a news story for today's 24/7 news cycle on the real-time Web.

It's a smart idea and it's free, at least for journalists. PR firms and companies will have to pay, although not at launch time.

NewsBasis raised $545,000 from Zelkova Ventures and individuals investors and is raising more capital now, according to the New York Times. Interested parties can sign up for a beta invite today.

We believe they can be a good idea, though. Below we discuss why and share thoughts about how we think an embargo can be run well. If you've got comments to share, don't be shy, that's what the comments section of a blog is for.

Editor's note: This story is part of a series we call Redux, where we'll re-publish some of our best posts of 2009. As we look back at the year - and ahead to what next year holds - we think these are the stories that deserve a second glance. It's not just a best-of list, it's also a collection of posts that examine the fundamental issues that continue to shape the Web. We hope you enjoy reading them again and we look forward to bringing you more Web products and trends analysis in 2010. Happy holidays from Team ReadWriteWeb!

Why Embargoes?

Not every announcement needs to be embargoed, but complicated ones involving new technology can benefit from such an exercise. Tech blogging is really competitive, some blogs won't write later about something discovered by one of their competitors. None of us like to, we don't want to give our readers the impression that we're slow on the news or have people skip our posts because they already read about something elsewhere.

Here's why embargoes can be good.

• They give multiple blogs a chance to review a technology in depth, instead of making it a race.
• This means readers get to read multiple perspectives on an interesting topic. Different bloggers have different strengths and ways of looking at things.
• Embargoes lead to more total coverage than exclusives. If you're someone for whom the only thing that mattered in high school was to win the approval of the most popular kid in school and you want to extend that philosophy into your work life as an adult - then the richness and breadth of your work and life experience will suffer accordingly. Exclusives are the tactic of people with weak products and of reporters who compete better in bullying than in writing.

How to Run an Embargo

This is one way to do it, but we think it's a good way.

Ask Writers if They Want Pre-release Info Under Embargo.

Sending an email briefly describing what's being launched and asking if a writer wants more pre-release info under embargo is a good way to entice people into engaging in conversation and to receive an explicit reply accepting the embargo.

A lot of people have been sending emails lately with all the information in them and asserting that it's embargoed until a particular time. Apparently accepting the embargo is assumed, but it seems a stretch to hold someone responsible for something they haven't agreed to.

Additionally, having a conversation is much more effective than shooting out one complete email and crossing your fingers.

Right: From ICanHazCheeseBurger, a blog you can always trust with an embargo.

Make Sure The Subject of the Embargo is...Embargoed

There is no sense in telling writers they can't write about something that's publicly available on the front of your website until a later date. An embargo involves an agreement hold off writing until a given time - in exchange for a chance to take a look at something before it's publicly available. If it's live and easily found - then anyone could find it. Thus anyone could write about it and it's fair game at any time.

Reach Out to Bloggers Large and Not so Large

A handful of top blogs in any niche are used to receiving press inquiries. Medium sized, up and coming blogs, usually only get spam or press releases for unexciting things. Offering to include an up and coming blog in an embargoed release is a sign of respect that will be appreciated. It will lead to more coverage, more links, and more perspectives. Readers don't read every post on the big blogs, many people will discover you through a post on a smaller blog or they will take the time to read about you after noticing that a number of people have written about your launch.

There's a sprawling network of tech blogs online and ideally your release would hit big and medium ones with such compelling news that an even larger number of smaller blogs would follow up with posts of their own. Blogging is a long tail world - choosing instead to put all your eggs in one basket (with an "exclusive," for example) isn't necessary or necessarily in your best interest.

That said, the only incentive bloggers have to respect embargoes is that they want to receive more embargoed information again in the future. It's serious or aspiring news-type blogs that have that incentive.

Send the Info and Offer to Talk

Some companies refuse to send launch info unless a blogger agrees to talk to their CEO on the phone. Co-incidentally, those CEOs are often particularly obnoxious. The best PR agents will accept a request to just send out a release and other pertinent info - along with an offer to talk. Many times it won't be necessary.

What is much more helpful is to make yourself available in the days and hours leading up to the embargo to answer any questions that come up. Providing a phone number, email and IM contact info for someone who can answer questions promptly is a big help.

Then, Lift the Embargo!

At the agreed upon time, push whatever you're launching live and go check out your blog coverage. Best practices for engaging with that coverage are subject enough for several other blog posts.

Questions

Will Bloggers Respect My Embargo?

If you do it right, they most likely will. At least 95% of the embargoes we see get respected by all the blogs that were included. Some are better than others, a few are downright awful. You can figure it out. Most are great, at least in our field.

What Do I do If A Blogger Breaks My Embargo?

There's a number of ways you can handle it but here's one option. Leave a matter of fact comment on the post ("This was embargoed until 4 hours from now and I would have appreciated it if you could have respected that.") and then let the other blogs you'd reached out to know that the embargo has been broken. You probably don't need to tell them by who, they'll check and find out on their own. Then they'll either run their story about you, or if they hadn't written it yet then they may not cover you at all.

Then ask yourself honestly if this was actually your own fault due to unclear or inconsistent communication. All serious news bloggers try to respect embargoes because that's part of the business. Sometimes they are thick headed, though, and that's how it goes.

How Much Lead Time Should I Give an Embargo and What Day of the Week Should It Lift?

It's up to you but we'd recommend three days lead time, lifting Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday or Friday - depending on an honest assessment of how exciting your product is. It's a crap shoot.

That's How We See it, How About You?

The above is just one take on embargoes in tech blogging. We know there are lots of other ways to look at it. See, for example, Louis Gray's excellent post this month where he makes similar arguments in more detail or pro-journalist Mathew Ingram's contrary post Embargoes: Thanks but No Thanks.

Thoughts? Feelings? Suggestions? Leave them in comments, because that's one of the things that makes blogging such a great form of media.

Title image: Untitled, CC from Flickr user Lauren.

Through short videos from some of the top industry minds including Google CEO Eric Schmidt, Lauder Professor at The Wharton School Jerry Wind and AAAA CEO Nancy Hill, the group hopes to challenge marketers to take risks and create better campaigns. For now, the site comes up short as the videos appear to answer questions in a very general manner with few specifics in terms of tactics and strategy. The most promising component of the site appears to be the "Free Tools" section with a list of resources including links to a website optimizer, search insights and 3rd party trends data from Facebook and Twitter. Nevertheless, as of this review, all of those links are dead. The first rule of marketing: test your product.

While this is a good site to get inspiration, social media marketers and PR pros who are looking for new strategies and specifics might be better off visiting Building43, PR 2.0 or asking questions through LinkedIn's online groups. Other great resources include the Social Media Club events and social marketing-related Meetups.

Many applications exist for monitoring social media buzz, but what about tools for the first step of online promotion: Creating the buzz in the first place? BuzzStream attempts to address the issue by allowing users to bookmark and track potential media and backlink contacts. It's an unusual solution, and one that we find intriguing. Read on for more info and beta invites.

In the entry forms, users can drill down for more information, from PageRank and site age to WhoIs lookup data and Technorati rank. As a group of people who get a lot of inbound mail from PR folks, we can tell you that this is a good thing. The more a press-seeker knows about the journalist in question, the more targeted and welcome the appeal for coverage is likely to be.

A welcome addition to this part of the app would be a tag cloud to ensure the contact is a relevant match. For example, we occasionally get pitches to review non-web related hardware. A PR pro or other evangelist could use such a feature to determine that our site might not be the best place to pitch his product.

Also, unless we missed something, we didn't see a good way for discovering new media or backlink contacts. A referral system ("Users who made this author a contact also added...") would probably be an awesome tool for users.

On the link-building side, the app allows users to denote the stage of the relationship, the method of link acquisition, and other relevant factors. We wish it showed whether links were search-bot followed or no-follow links, but perhaps this request will be heard and discussed for future releases of the product.

Once a contact is added, Twitter and email conversations with that contact can be easily indexed for future reference. Watch the demo video for a closer look at how contacts and link-building campaigns are managed from the back end.

What we like about the service is that it addresses the problem of social media optimization. In modern times, SEO is no longer enough to supply a site with competition-killing traffic. No-follow links are no longer the huge bummer they once were. Organic search traffic counts, and social sharing traffic counts, too. BuzzStream takes this all into account rather nicely and simply and allows busy PR and social web folks to efficiently and profitably manage those relationships.

As a new site, BuzzSearch is still a bit buggy. Not all available information is correctly and automatically indexed. Still, it's a good start and we look forward to seeing what these guys do next.

Two hundred fifty beta invites are available at the BuzzStream site. Hope you enjoy, and don't forget to send in your feedback to the founders.

We disagree. We think embargoes can be very useful for all parties. This Fall we published a post about how and why embargoes work in tech blogging and we thought we'd share those thoughts now that the controversy has flared up again.

Why Embargoes Are Good

We argued in our previous post that embargoes are good for the following reasons:

• They give multiple blogs a chance to review a technology in depth, instead of making it a race.


• This means readers get to read multiple perspectives on an interesting topic. Different bloggers have different strengths and ways of looking at things.


• Embargoes lead to more total coverage than exclusives. If you're someone for whom the only thing that mattered in high school was to win the approval of the most popular kid in school and you want to extend that philosophy into your work life as an adult - then the richness and breadth of your work and life experience will suffer accordingly. Exclusives are the tactic of people with weak products and of reporters who compete better in bullying than in writing.

How should embargoes be run well? We discussed our perspective on it in depth in our post Why and How Embargoes Work in Tech Blogging.

We hope you'll join us in the conversation on that post and that you'll continue to email us your embargoed announcements at tips@readwriteweb.com.

We believe they can be a good idea, though. Below we discuss why and share thoughts about how we think an embargo can be run well. If you've got comments to share, don't be shy, that's what the comments section of a blog is for.

Not every announcement needs to be embargoed, but complicated ones involving new technology can benefit from such an exercise. Tech blogging is really competitive, some blogs won't write later about something discovered by one of their competitors. None of us like to, we don't want to give our readers the impression that we're slow on the news or have people skip our posts because they already read about something elsewhere.

Here's why embargoes can be good.

• They give multiple blogs a chance to review a technology in depth, instead of making it a race.


• This means readers get to read multiple perspectives on an interesting topic. Different bloggers have different strengths and ways of looking at things.


• Embargoes lead to more total coverage than exclusives. If you're someone for whom the only thing that mattered in high school was to win the approval of the most popular kid in school and you want to extend that philosophy into your work life as an adult - then the richness and breadth of your work and life experience will suffer accordingly. Exclusives are the tactic of people with weak products and of reporters who compete better in bullying than in writing.

How to Run an Embargo

This is one way to do it, but we think it's a good way.

Ask Writers if They Want Pre-release Info Under Embargo.

Sending an email briefly describing what's being launched and asking if a writer wants more pre-release info under embargo is a good way to entice people into engaging in conversation and to receive an explicit reply accepting the embargo.

A lot of people have been sending emails lately with all the information in them and asserting that it's embargoed until a particular time. Apparently accepting the embargo is assumed, but it seems a stretch to hold someone responsible for something they haven't agreed to.

Additionally, having a conversation is much more effective than shooting out one complete email and crossing your fingers.

Right: From ICanHazCheeseBurger, a blog you can always trust with an embargo.

Make Sure The Subject of the Embargo is...Embargoed

There is no sense in telling writers they can't write about something that's publicly available on the front of your website until a later date. An embargo involves an agreement hold off writing until a given time - in exchange for a chance to take a look at something before it's publicly available. If it's live and easily found - then anyone could find it. Thus anyone could write about it and it's fair game at any time.

Reach Out to Bloggers Large and Not so Large

A handful of top blogs in any niche are used to recieving press inquiries. Medium sized, up and coming blogs, usually only get spam or press releases for unexciting things. Offering to include an up and coming blog in an embargoed release is a sign of respect that will be appreciated. It will lead to more coverage, more links, and more perspectives. Readers don't read every post on the big blogs, many people will discover you through a post on a smaller blog or they will take the time to read about you after noticing that a number of people have written about your launch.

There's a sprawling network of tech blogs online and ideally your release would hit big and medium ones with such compelling news that an even larger number of smaller blogs would follow up with posts of their own. Blogging is a long tail world - chosing instead to put all your eggs in one basket (with an "exclusive," for example) isn't necesary or necesarily in your best interest.

That said, the only incentive bloggers have to respect embargoes is that they want to recieve more embargoed information again in the future. It's serious or aspiring news-type blogs that have that incentive.

Send the Info and Offer to Talk

Some companies refuse to send launch info unless a blogger agrees to talk to their CEO on the phone. Co-incidentally, those CEOs are often particularly obnoxious. The best PR agents will accept a request to just send out a release and other pertinent info - along with an offer to talk. Many times it won't be necesary.

What is much more helpful is to make yourself available in the days and hours leading up to the embargo to answer any questions that come up. Providing a phone number, email and IM contact info for someone who can answer questions promptly is a big help.

Then, Lift the Embargo!

At the agreed upon time, push whatever you're lauching live and go check out your blog coverage. Best practices for engaging with that coverage are subject enough for several other blog posts.

Questions

Will Bloggers Respect My Embargo?

If you do it right, they most likely will. At least 95% of the embargoes we see get respected by all the blogs that were included. Some are better than others, a few are downright awful. You can figure it out. Most are great, at least in our field.

What Do I do If A Blogger Breaks My Embargo?

There's a number of ways you can handle it but here's one option. Leave a matter of fact comment on the post ("This was embargoed until 4 hours from now and I would have appreciated it if you could have respected that.") and then let the other blogs you'd reached out to know that the embargo has been broken. You probably don't need to tell them by who, they'll check and find out on their own. Then they'll either run their story about you, or if they hadn't written it yet then they may not cover you at all.

Then ask yourself honestly if this was actually your own fault due to unclear or inconsistent communication. All serious news bloggers try to respect embargoes because that's part of the business. Sometimes they are thick headed, though, and that's how it goes.

How Much Lead Time Should I Give an Embargo and What Day of the Week Should It Lift?

It's up to you but we'd recommend three days lead time, lifting Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday or Friday - depending on an honest assesment of how exciting your product is. It's a crapshoot.

That's How We See it, How About You?

The above is just one take on embargoes in tech blogging. We know there are lots of other ways to look at it. See, for example, Louis Gray's excellent post this month where he makes similar arguments in more detail or pro-journalist Mathew Ingram's contrary post Embargoes: Thanks but No Thanks.

Thoughts? Feelings? Suggestions? Leave them in comments, because that's one of the things that makes blogging such a great form of media.

Title image: Untitled, CC from Flickr user Lauren.

Maybe it's no big deal, but we think it's an interesting question. What do you think? Let us know in the poll below, even if you work in PR yourself.

RSS readers can click here to view or participate in the poll.

Earlier this month we asked whether good tech even needs PR. In that post we discuss some important things PR agencies do for their clients - things that make voting for them in polls look downright silly. That's our take on it, anyway, what's yours?

Photo: raise your hands for jesus by Flickr user johny hunter.

Imeem Taking Off - Before MySpace Music Has Even Launched

Music-based social networking site Imeem is getting a lot of the right kind of press currently, based on strong traffic growth and key deals with record labels. We last wrote about Imeem in March, when they launched a developer platform that enabled read/write access to user information and more. As we explained then, Imeem is a site where users can listen to licensed streaming music, as well as upload music and blog about it - all for free. Now, Imeem is the third-largest social network in the United States after MySpace and Facebook; and it's now the No. 1 streaming music site in the US.

The Fire Eagle Has Landed: Yahoo Opens Its Location Platform to All

Yahoo announced that the close beta period for its location platform Fire Eagle has ended and that the service is now open for everybody. We wrote about Fire Eagle extensively when the beta was first announced. Since then, a number of high-profile services, including Brightkite, Movable Type, Dopplr, and Pownce have implemented Fire Eagle through the numerous APIs Yahoo provides for accessing the service.

Wiki Editing Just Got Easier: Atlassian Confluence Releases Office Connector

Atlassian Confluence, makers of one of the most popular enterprise wiki solutions, announced this week a Microsoft Office and SharePoint integration in their latest release, Confluence 2.9. With these new tools, users no longer have to know the technicalities of wiki markup or even how to use the included rich-text WYSIWYG editor in order to make changes to the wiki - they can simply open up a Microsoft Office document instead. Also, with the addition of the SharePoint connector, Microsoft's well-known collaboration and document sharing platform gets a big dose of Enterprise 2.0 goodness, which is sure to please the end users. However, Confluence makes I.T. happy too, thanks to their inclusion of tools - like LDAP integration and administratively controlled permissions - that are designed just for the needs of the enterprise.

See also: The Semantic Desktop? SDS Brings Semantics To Excel

Google Should Buy eXpresso

Like a lot of people, Bernard Lunn had problems with Google Apps this week. Sure, Google "feels his pain" but they also lost his confidence. And confidence is a delicate thing. What crashed was Spreadsheet. That has always been the weakest component for Google and the strongest for Microsoft. Excel rocks, its just a tad behind the times on collaboration. But in this post we explain how Google could still win the spreadsheet game by buying eXpress Corp.

Livestreaming From Qik and Flixwagon Comes to the iPhone

It's no secret that the iPhone lacks video recording capabilities, which has served as a huge roadblock for companies and services that would like to introduce services that take advantage of video capabilities. For users that love to livestream or lifestream from their iPhones this is also a huge drawback. Well worry no more iPhone heads because Qik and Flixwagon have both introduced their livestreaming apps to jailbroken iPhones!

SEE MORE WEB PRODUCTS COVERAGE IN OUR PRODUCTS CATEGORY

Web Trends

Olympics: Only 0.2% of Viewers Exclusively Watch Online

According to the Wall Street Journal, the Olympics are off to a good, but not amazing start on the Internet. Over the first three days, NBC's online coverage drew an average of 4.7 million viewers per day, with the numbers steadily rising over the weekend. So far, Sunday was the most watched day, with 5.1 million total users and 3.42 million streams. According to the same article, only 0.2% of all viewers exclusively used the Internet to watch the Games, while 90% used the traditional TV coverage exclusively and 10% used both the Internet and TV.

Does Good Tech Need PR?

Behind the scenes of many tech blogs these days, there's a rat race for attention, with PR agents struggling to overcome the noise of feeds, news sites and other agents in order to get coverage for their clients. Tiny web tech companies pay $5k, $10k or more per month for PR agents to work the media, old and new, in hopes that it will help them find wider audiences. Big companies spend far, far more on PR. Is that really necessary? Won't great technologies find their own audiences when their undeniable value is discovered by one person and passed on to the world at large?

The App Store: Soon To Be A Billion Dollar Marketplace?

Anyone who has the iPhone or iPod Touch can tell you that one of the best things about owning the device is the ability to add apps from iTunes App Store. Although many of the apps that we talk about here are the free ones like the social networking apps, the instant messaging apps, and the blogging apps, it's the paid apps that are making the store a financial success.

See also: How To Lifestream From Your iPhone

Data Portability Working Group Elects New Leadership

The high profile but heretofore loosely organized Data Portability Working Group announced this week that it has elected its first group of Steering Group officers. The Working Group strives to help user data become freed for secure re-use across different websites and services. The first chair of the Steering Group will be Daniela Barbosa, who is a Business Development Manager, at Synaptica, a Dow Jones company. Can the Data Portability Working Group overcome some early shakiness caused by the perception that it's all hype and no substance? The group got big press when Microsoft, Google, Facebook and many other companies publicly joined up - but critics allege that press is all that's been accomplished.

Startup, Inc - What You Need to Know Before Starting a Company

Often people start a company without any clear idea of what a company is. Entrepreneurs closet themselves in the garage and start writing code. While the modern tech world could not exist without obsession, artistic inspiration and crazy engineers, there's more to a startup than passion. In this post, we explore the basics behind corporate entities, stock, financing, and the key non-technical infrastructure every company should have.

See also: 12 Unit Testing Tips for Software Engineers

SEE MORE WEB TRENDS COVERAGE IN OUR TRENDS CATEGORY

RWW Live

Future of Blogging

The latest episode of RWW Live, our live podcast show, was on the topic of 'The Future of Blogging'. It was based on a must-read post that Sarah Perez wrote last week and one I wrote a couple of weeks back. We had two special guests on the show this week: Aaron Brazelle of the Technosailor blog and Muhammed Saleem, an occasional contributor to RWW and a social media consultant.

Select RWW Live Episode 5

That's a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone.

Is that really necessary? Won't great technologies find their own audiences when their undeniable value is discovered by one person and passed on to the world at large?

Image above: PR Stereotype, by Brian Solis, who is a class act in PR.

Wine and Dine 2.0

Blogger Robert Scoble made a post this morning asserting that great technology will find its audience naturally, through word of mouth. Robert told a story about his discovery of Stack Overflow. Someone he trusted had visited the site, loved it and then passed on the word. While that particular example isn't the best one, Stack Overflow founders Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood are two of the most well-known software developers in the world right now, the basic premise is worth considering. Does great technology need PR?

Technology gets a lot of PR in the world of new media. If the thought of bloggers put in limos, driven around big cities and drowned in champaign seems absurd to you, rest assured - it happens. More often, though, tech bloggers get drowned in standardized emails.

There are, however, some really good PR people reaching out to bloggers. What do they do for their clients?

The Good Sides of PR

Help with messaging.

Good PR agents work with companies well before a product launch and help them develop a coherent explanation of their technology. Developers are sometimes wonkish, executives long-winded and few people in the world can describe what they are doing as clearly as a trained professional bringing a fresh pair of eyes can.

Unfortunately many PR people don't act as barrier enough between CEOs and press. Some can tell almost the whole story themselves and get back to a writer with quotes or replies as needed. That's great.

If you don't need a PR agent to help you tell your story - that's fantastic. Unfortunately, many companies do.

One of our favorite PR people in terms of help with messaging is Josh Dilworth, from Porter Novelli. He understands and is interested in the technology he represents.

Good communication skills.

As a product launch approaches, dedicated PR people should be unbeatable when it comes to doing the leg work of outreach in a capable way. They should know how the media being targeted operates, they should be good person people and they should communicate like people who specialize in communication with media, new and old.

Company founders have spent their time developing other skills, and many in-house marketing people would probably be higher-paid PR people if they had the same skill-set themselves. It's hard to know whether marketing or PR people deserve more disdain - even people in the businesses will tell you that, bless their hearts. None the less, both are in some cases very good at what they do.

If there is a circle in hell for marketing and PR people it will be because they often hype businesses that they couldn't possibly genuinely believe in. If that's enough to go to hell for, though, a whole lot of us will be there.

Contacts

The primary value proposition of PR used to be getting column inches in print and for many clients that's still what's important. Getting top blog coverage is also a major coup for PR, though, and all these kinds of developed relationships are something PR people offer to leverage for clients. They know the reporters and know how they like to be communicated with.

That can be true. Good PR people can take care of the details, be choosy about what stories to pitch which journalists with, etc. The intimacy of relationships are sometimes exaggerated, though, and the best PR people will simply show off successful placement of past clients in sought-after media outlets.

Looking at PR from the outside, it appears to be a strange line of work. A good PR person can be very good to have - it's a shame they are so hard to find.

Who's Good at PR?

Who are some PR people we like working with? One of our new favorites is Josh Dilworth, from Porter Novelli. He understands and is interested in the technology he represents. Erica Lee, of Strategiclee, is great to communicate with. Jonathan Hirshon of Horizon PR knows the business as well as anyone. Michaela Wilkinson of Dig Communications pays attention to how we prefer to be communicated with and we find her quite effective as a result. Neville Hobson is a rock star and a gentleman. Jeremy Pepper is usually fantastic at cutting through the b.s. There are many examples of good PR people in the industry, so please take our criticisms with a grain of salt.

The Down Sides

There is probably more skepticism about the necessity of PR people than there is about any other players in the tech startup food chain, except perhaps for Venture Capitalists.

Founders should make connections themselves.

Some people argue that company founders should be mixing it up with bloggers and journalists directly. They should be making those connections, taking the temperature of the market and media.

If company executives or marketing people have the time and the skills to do this kind of work themselves, the rewards would be substantial, no doubt. In many cases that's just not the case though.

It's expensive.

Paying the equivalent of a full time employee's salary, much less a high one, for PR work being done 1/4 time or less each week can really sting. Meeting an agency's heavy hitters, then getting matched with very junior agency members once the check clears can really bite.

In many cases, though, that's not how it goes. Horror stories can be told about almost any job title. All media related work is hard and wins are few and far between. For more than a few companies, good PR is money well spent.

Should Tech Be Able to Stand and Thrive on Its Own?

Ultimately, the biggest reason many people argue that PR agencies are unneeded is that great technology shouldn't need them. In some cases that's true. Steve Rubel writes today that tech bloggers love to discover things for themselves and that's one reason why we often don't like PR. There's some truth to that too. Rubel, who works for one of the biggest PR firms in the world, also says the lack of enthusiasm is attributable to the fact that the vast majority of PR pitches aren't worth a piece of gum stuck to the bottom of your shoe. That's a relatively humble PR guy saying that.

Jeremy Toeman, a PR person himself, goes as crazy as a responsible PR guy can in a post today about this question. He mocks people who think their technology will market itself. To be fair, a number of his clients are confusing or insipid enough that we wish even his brilliant and charming self the best of luck in promoting them. We talk to quite a few PR companies representing companies that are either boring or that insist on having their PR reps pitch non-announcements that are boring.

One example worth considering is Balsamiq, a plucky little mock-up creator we wrote about after it became profitable only 3 weeks after launching. It's an awesome little technology that fills a clear need and has taken off. Balsamiq caught fire without even getting any press before we covered it, much less without PR. Will it become a multi-million dollar acquisition that puts a team of people on the beach with cocktails for life? No, it won't. Will millions of people use it? Probably not millions.

The point is that great technologies probably do sell themselves. The web is mostly filled with bad technologies, though, and it's the job of the technology press to find the good ones, with occasional discoveries of greatness. Can PR people help us do that? They can. Is it worth the expense and loss of direct experience for many startups to hire PR people? It probably is.

That won't stop people from rolling their eyes at the mention of the profession, but we appreciate consistently being proven wrong by valuable, skilled PR professionals who assist in our hunt to find and write about good tech.

TruCast allows companies to monitor internet buzz by analyzing blogs, social networks, consumer opinion and review sites, bulletin boards, discussion forums, newsgroups, and online news sites to determine what's being said and how engaged customers are with the company's brand. Several well-known companies currently using the TruCast system to monitor and respond to their customers include Dell, Microsoft, Panasonic, and Hormel.

Dell, who is known to be one of the more forward-thinking companies when it comes to listening and responding to their customers, uses TruCast to actively monitor posts, comments, and conversations on 40 different online topics related to the Dell brand, the details of which are revealed in this new case study which has been posted to the TruCast web site. According to the study, TruCast enabled Dell to reduce the negative sentiment about their brand by more than 50%.

TruCast 2.0

Now, with the launch of TruCast 2.0, the technology has been improved to monitor and discover even more online conversations than before. According to the company, TruCast now currently harvests and analyzes nearly 70% more data than any other competing applications. The technology they use delves into the social conversations that are taking place - reading through comments, follow-up comments, and more to determine the relevance and attitude of each item it finds.

TruCast Dashboard

More importantly, TruCast works with a business to give the right people inside the company the access to the relevant data in order to respond in a timely and appropriate fashion. And although the conversations are coming in from all over the internet, TruCast streamlines them into one central application where they can be tracked, read, and answered, which makes the workflow of brand analysis and response as simple to handle as checking your inbox for new mail.

TruCast Response Manager

If you want to learn more about how TruCast is helping companies stay on top of the ever-changing social media landscape, you can view this presentation (below) from the American Marketing Association's (AMA) Online Seminar:

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Townsend was CEO of Avis, an auto rental company, who took on the much bigger Hertz with the "We try harder" proposition, a classic story for scrappy number two players beating up on the gorilla. The book is full of timeless wisdom, but the relevant bit here is the way he allowed all his managers to speak to the press without any prepared script. His simple point was, if you were a journalist, who would you want to talk to when a big story breaks? Hertz's PR department or the guys actually running the business at Avis? That's right. Back in 1970, this guy was saying, "loosen up, forget about command and control, let front line managers make the call."

He was radical on other fronts. His book was organized alphabetically, for example. Under P for Personnel Department his pithy advice (I am going from memory here) was, "fire them, people manage people." But that's another story.

His advice on PR is even more critical today. The Internet makes command and control models pretty obsolete. Sure, some data has to be controlled. The financial results for a public company need to be issued in a certain way to comply with SEC regulations. But that's about it. Whether you use a newswire service or your blog, the key is lighten up on the process and get into the flow. That flow may be a blog, or Twitter, or Facebook or any of the above and more. The general point is simply about availability and transparency.

If you really have a great story to tell, that will get even the most jaded journalist interested.

Public relations needs to evolve from gatekeeper and process manager to coach, helping the front line managers work effectively with media and the market. That assumes that their clients are enlightened enough to give them that mandate.