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:

| View | Upload your own

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.

Wrong: Email the wrong email address

Richard MacManus started this blog on April 20, 2003 - that means this weekend will be the site's 5th birthday! Richard has worked very hard to grow the blog to now include a staff of writers (hold your applause, please!) but he's worked so hard that you really ought not impose the extra work on him of forwarding your tips to tips@readwriteweb.com. That's where you should send email in the first place, if you're going to at all. Don't send general pitches to him, to me, to Josh or to Sarah. Send them to tips@readwriteweb.com. That's right, if you send your email to tips@readwriteweb.com then we'll all see it. We'll all appreciate you for it too, because all to often that's not how people do it, despite our many pleas.

We get a lot of email, though, and I know I'm usually scanning the inbox looking for direct, personal communication with subject lines like "here's the money I owe you" or "this is your Mother, why haven't you called all week?" We do try to at least scan all your pitch emails, but really - that's not enough.

Embargoed news should still come in three or four days in advance ideally - by email, to tips@readwriteweb.com, but you can communicate far more with us as described below.

Wrong: Phone Calls

Some of us get a lot of phone calls, especially from PR agents. Some of us (Richard) live in New Zealand and don't have to deal with that. I personally don't mind an occasional phone call if it's about something really interesting or from someone I know to have good taste in tips. Sarah hates the telephone and does not want you to call her on it. Josh says phone calls have been driving him "batty" - especially in this week leading up to the Web 2.0 Expo.

We get a fair amount of phone calls from people pitching products that do not fit our readers' interests or that just aren't that interesting. You think your news is interesting (or, more likely, your client does) but unless we consider it interesting ourselves - a phone call could really backfire on our disposition towards you and your client for future coverage.

Wrong: Twitter, Especially DM

Sending a Direct Message from Twitter just ends up being another email. I tell myself, "I'll look at that later." How about a public Tweet that says "I've got news about a new ad platform targeting seniors on mobile browsers! DM me if you want it under embargo." We'll jump on that, because that's the kind of thing we eat up over here.

If you're pitching people on Twitter, you'd better have a whole lot of other interesting things to say between pitches. At the same time, when I visit the Twitter page of someone who is working for an interesting company, much less representing them on Twitter, I get disappointed (personally) if there is nothing about their work being said.

Wrong: Facebook

For most of us here at RWW at least, Facebook is a place for personal communication if anything at all. For me, it's like the email inbox I never check. What could be worse than that? If we knew each other in college, then by all means let's communicate by Facebook. I did once ruthlessly and publicly make fun of a certain PR person for pitching me cold on Facebook and after the ensuing kerfluffle we've become buds and I read every pitch she sends.

Personal connections are the best PR (isn't that what PR agents are hired to provide, in part - well developed relationships with press?) and everybody knows that being Facebook friends doesn't mean the same thing as being real friends.

Wrong: IM

Can you imagine having PR people IM you about their clients' events (and non-events, all too often)? That's the kind of thing that full time tech bloggers have to deal with! (Have I mentioned that the seat of my jeans are threadbare too? Oh, the suffering! Lol.)

Different members of our team have different feelings about IM pitches but I'm the only one that will tolerate them much. If we develop a personal relationship and I tell you we can IM, then we can IM. As of right now, though, I'm going to stop taking IMs from PR and startup people I haven't said I wanted to communicate that way with or that I don't do so with already.

If you as a PR or startup person can make yourself available by IM to answer questions when we're writing, that's better than great - it's fantastic. IM pitches, unless they are from people we know and they consist of nothing more than "Hey, company offering RSS feeds to mobile devices for 'low-supply of pet food in the pantry' alerts, about to launch - do you want info?" That's fine.

A Great Way to Do It: By RSS

PR people, please send us the RSS feeds of your clients' blogs and news releases.

The information that comes through these feeds is obviously public and there's no embargo - but if we didn't see something interesting in an embargoed email then we'll see it in RSS. Likewise, many companies blog about things that they might not consider cause for a press release but that we definitely want to write about.

The full fire-hose of company news and updates for us to pick out what's interesting, someplace outside of our email inboxes, free of dreadful press release rhetoric (skip to the second paragraph where details usually are, then skip past any executive quotes and hope there are readable details somewhere) - that sounds like a dream come true. I know that's where I get most of the stories I write about, not from email pitches. Send both, but company feeds are likely to be looked at more closely.

Most PR companies have changing client rosters, though, and OPML files are static files that don't update themselves. Here's what could be the best-case solution.

Voce Communications' Justin Kistner sent me a great OPML file in response to my asking on Twitter why so few PR people have sent my their clients' feeds. Here's the file Justin put together and here's what it contains:

• The feed for Voce's company blog, Voce Nation
• A feed for press releases, which he said was empty right now but will deliver the goods when there are items available
• A combined feed of all the Voce peoples' messages on Twitter, built using the attractive service Tweetpeek - something I hadn't seen before. I'm going to delete this feed from my reader just because I already converse with two thousand people on Twitter and I don't need more of those messages in my RSS reader. Better safe than sorry, though - an OPML file can be like a menu for subscribers to select from.
• The highlight of the file is a feed from Yahoo Pipes that splices together the blogs of all of Voce's PR clients. It's something that Justin can edit behind the scenes and I'll never know the difference - I'll just get posts from the feeds of new clients as he ads their feeds to the master feed I've subscribed to. It's a great solution to the problem.

  Hopefully he won't remove the feeds of companies that leave Voce, but maybe he should. That's his call, I probably won't notice the difference if I suddenly stop seeing one of hundreds of company feeds I'm subscribed to.

PR people, would you all please send us something like what Justin Kistner of Voce sent us? Please? The increased familiarity alone on our part with your clients would make it worth your time. If we're already reading your clients' blogs, we're also more likely to pay attention to your emails because we have some previous relationship with the companies you're reading about. If Yahoo Pipes is scary (it scared me for a long time, but now I can tell you it's easy) then check out these tutorials.

It's not that hard to do and our feed readers is where online journalists go to find new stories. Don't you want to meet us where we're at? It's also a great way to learn about the kinds of technologies that are in play - instead of just using old methods to pitch types of technology that you don't actually use or participate in.

The real value of good journalism and blogs, IMHO, is the value-added analysis and contextual information that we can provide. A press release that runs in Business Wire may well be a great source of data on a news story. But people read newspapers and blogs to get a more rounded view of news stories, and if they're lucky some added analysis about the company and/or market segment.

I asked Techmeme founder Gabe Rivera what he thought of Business Wire ranking #32 on the Techmeme Leaderboard. Gabe replied that this in itself "isn't a problem." He told me that "press releases are kind of like poorly-written company blog posts, which also have a place on Techmeme. That said, I wish Techmeme at times did a better job at elevating good blog posts above the press releases they discuss."

I asked Gabe if people actually read press releases from the likes of Business Wire. "Sometimes people want just-the-facts", said Gabe, "Some PR Newswire releases are in fact remarkable reads". He pointed to this recent story about Microsoft's bid for Yahoo (screenshot below). But, Gabe noted, "many others are less so, and better retold by blogs like RWW."

Techmeme coverage of Microsoft-Yahoo story, with PR stories to the fore

Back to the Business Wire email, which stated that "with a team of engineers and coders, press releases have not only gone 'public' but they are embedded with multimedia and infiltrate search engine and social media flawlessly."

I agree that PR has infiltrated search engines and some blogs - which in the former is good and the latter not so. It's definitely a good thing that PR is public nowadays due to the Internet. Because it forces journalists and blogs to provide added value to news stories, rather than just copy and paste PR.

You still see some blogs rank highly in Technorati by copying PR sometimes word for word. But long term I think such blogs will, ironically, have their lunch eaten by PR services such as Business Wire. Already Business Wire claims it is embedding their stories with multimedia, so how long before they start to have other 'social software' features such as comments, voting, tagging, etc.

So yes, PR wire services probably don't need us anymore. But to some of us, that's a good thing!

Like the AOL announcement of roughly the same thing in February of last year, the key question is whether Yahoo! will do anything substantive with OpenID or whether, like the AOL announcement, this will just be window dressing to legitimize advocates of OpenID. AOL's support for OpenID appears to have resulted in little more.

Nothing but a few information pages are live at Yahoo! yet, though the announcement went out a few hours ago. Those pages say that users will need to enable OpenID for their Yahoo! accounts; there's no info I can find on how to do that and other sites say they can't find an OpenID server when I try to use my Yahoo! ID that way. Silly me, nothing will be live until the last day of January it turns out.

Far more is possible

There's no information about what a Yahoo! OpenID will look like, either. Will it just be a dumb login or will the company offer important functionality like multiple personas (for privacy and user control), search friendly microformats and anti-phishing technology? There's a wide variety of ways to implement OpenID. I'd recommend you check out the site SpreadOpenID for a feature comparison of a large number of OpenID providers. Just authenticating OpenID is only the beginning, there's a wide range of features offered by various vendors too.

Public legitimacy and user numbers are great for the OpenID movement to receive from Yahoo! but I hope they will also contribute a significant amount of money. It sure seems to me that the whole thing could use some dedicated staff in order to put some meat on the bones.

What are Yahoo's interests?

One way to look at today's announcement is that Yahoo! will now know what other services its users use around the web and big yellow and purple buttons will be spread hither and yon. Sounds great for Yahoo! but if you've chosen another OpenID provider who better satisfies your needs - that doesn't mean much to Yahoo! right now.

What incentive does Yahoo! have to take the next step and offer full support to OpenID in general? Not much right now. In theory that could lead to access to user information from a wider number of users from other communities but when you're at the top of the hill with 248 million users that might not seem so important.

In theory if Google were to start accepting OpenID logins from Yahoo! users then the floodgates would open and Yahoo! would have to return the favor - but I don't know if we should hold our breath. Google has opened up to any OpenID login on commenting for Blogger but we'll see how much further that goes.

What's needed next

As a peripheral observer of the OpenID movement I probably ought not be so bold as to offer my suggestions for what steps should be taken next - today's announcement really is a big win for the OpenID community - but I'm an impatient blogger so I am going to do just that.

There needs to be a comprehensive campaign of public education about the value of OpenID in general. If Yahoo! would communicate with its users about these matters in a high-profile way that would be great. How many AOL users know they have an OpenID? Not very many.

Yahoo! should accept inbound OpenID from other providers. Have you seen the way that Basecamp and Ma.gnolia allow users to associate an OpenID with their in-house accounts? That could be a good model for Yahoo! to follow. If OpenID is about openness and not just about extending your own brand elsewhere, something like that has to happen.

Some of these major vendors need to put some money on the table. Presumably there are Yahoo! staff focused on OpenID and related matters, but neutral third parties need to be funded to move the entire agenda forward. I'm sure this is in the works but it's very important.

The pace of OpenID's advance is encouraging by some standards - 3 years ago effectively no one had heard of it, two years ago it was a pipe dream and one year ago the ball started rolling. This is the internet, though, and three years ago YouTube didn't exist. No one would cheer for the progress of online video today if it were crawling forward the way OpenID has. The benefits of online video are clearly communicated and there is money on the table, though.

OpenID is a matter of usability, data portability, user rights and will someday be a competitive necessity for vendors if implemented right. Today's announcement is good news, but let's not throw too big a party yet.

We've been on the phone and email with Amazon's PR department all day today. It's been a great example of the challenges any of these huge companies face in trying to be either Open or Social, much less both.

The long and short of it is this: Amazon has nothing to say; they told us they did, but they don't. If they do have anything to say they would like to say it through words put into my mouth. Thanks, Amazon. I don't think you've got much Openness to bring to my Social even if that is what you intend to do.

Here's the time-line.

2. The press release, though clearly a draft (not uncommon, PR people send us draft releases all the time), is dated November 15th. So 12:00 AM EST on the 15th arrived last night and I wrote up a post - after figuring out at the last minute that the claims in the release about "first ever" access to MP3s are the kind of information that uninformed journalists fall for and power users laugh at us for printing. Typical of too much PR practice, someone's trying to trick me, not make both our jobs easier. I added snark to my post about this, but I took it out just to be decent - it was clearly a draft release and there's no need to be nasty more than I really need to be.

3. Post went up, I had a nice night vacuuming my living room floor.

4. In the morning I woke up to a flurry of emails. According to an email sent to one of our writers at 11:59 PM EST the night before one minute before the release time - they threw on the brakes. Our writer wasn't awake and didn't see it until the morning, when we both received more emails insisting that we remove the post, that the release "was never issued," no statement's been made, it's not true and it's still under embargo anyway. Frustrating, but funny.

5. I then put up an update reading:

"Update: Amazon contacted us this morning to let us know that though they sent us a draft press release, they are not in fact making any such announcement, they are not supporting OpenSocial and if they were it would still be under embargo anyway despite the date on said release."

I twittered about the absurdity of it all and Valleywag picked up the story. It was Read/WriteWeb's second appearance on Valleywag today and we felt naughty by association.

6. I talked to various Amazon people throughout the day on the phone, refusing (very nicely) to take down the story or remove all references to Open Social. They did not like the update I posted.

They were not happy, but they were nice enough about it. What can you do when dealing with a blogger? We are so irrational and hard to communicate with!

I offered to post a different update if they'd like to send me a statement. I meant a statement from them.

7. They sent me the following.

"Since the publication of this post, an Amazon spokesperson contacted me to clarify that no announcement was made in regards to support for Open Social. The Amazon spokesperson went on to say that Social network developers have been using the Amazon Associates Web Service to merchandise Amazon products (and earn Associates commissions) for some time. She indicated that Amazon would continue to provide developers with tools that allow them to choose the platform that makes the most sense for them regardless of the Social networking site they are building on. She pointed out..." blah blah blah.

I cannot believe they'd send me text written in the first person and expect me to post it under my own name! Not to mention the really uptight language they've got that puppet named Marshall using! I tried to mock them coyly but without cruelty at the top of the original post.

The Grand Finale

The conclusion of this ridiculous story is that I've put up this post here.

In some ways, this isn't about communicating with bloggers at all. When one billion dollar company is considering interacting formally with other billion dollar companies - why would you tell press about it before everyone is sure and why would you just generally drop the ball like this?

In regards to this particular situation, though, Amazon is probably not alone in a group that includes Google, MySpace, Bebo and a long list of other giant companies in not understanding what it means to be Open or Social. If these people can't communicate like human beings with a blogger going out of my way to be nice to them, why on earth should I be excited about their finding religion and embracing the OpenSocial Brand Platform?