If you’re interested in Google+, here’s a variety of blog posts, articles, and Google+ posts that will help you get the most out of Google+.

How to Make A Google+ Account That You’ll Actually Use by Reputation Capital

The Ultimate Google+ Cheat Sheet from Hubspot

Cadbury Google+ case study from Google

LateRooms.com Google+ case study from Google

Mashable Google+ case study from Google

Financial Times Google+ case study from Google

Google+ Marketing For Dummies book by Jesse Stay

Beginner’s Guide to Google+ by KissMetrics

The Marketers Guide to Google+ by KissMetrics

5 Creative Ways Businesses Are Using Google+ Hangouts by Social Media Examiner

How are you using Google+? Have you found a specific blog post or article about Google+ that was really helpful to you? If so, let us know in the comments below.

When I gave up the book reading list habit, there certainly weren’t the social media platforms that there are now for tracking what you’ve read. And, I could always do this on Goodreads. However, I’ve never been a huge fan of Goodreads’user interface, so I’ll just do it here, and I’ll update this post every time I read a new book.

One note, this is ostensibly a business/professional blog given that I’ve worked in PR for the past 15+ years, handling PR for a wide variety of digital and software companies at the intersection of media, mobile, digital, and marketing. However, while there may be occasional business-oriented books that show up on this list, I’m a voracious fiction reader, and the list will most likely reflect that. I’ve never been one to participate in reading groups or even annual reading challenges. I basically read whatever strikes my fancy, and I live in a house filled with books – many of which I haven’t read yet. Without further ado.

1. In Joy Still Felt, The Autobiography of Isaac Asimov by Isaac Asimov 

This was a re-read for me. I read this two-volume biography of Isaac Asimov, the famed science fiction writer, when I was in my 20s. I enjoy this kind of book, but if you’re not interested in writing and book publishing I imagine this could get pretty boring. There’s lots of passages, “I wrote XXX story and mailed it to X or Y editor, and then I started working on a new non-fiction book about the Universe . . ” I loved this view behind the curtain of a working writer – and a writer who was extremely prolific.

2. Breakout by Richard Stark

I’ve been a long-time fan of Richard Stark’s Parker novels. Of course, Richard Stark is Donald Westlake’s pen name for hard-driving crime novels. These Parker novels can literally be read in one-sitting if you have a couple of hours to kill. This was definitely not my favorite Parker novel. Stark’s style is flat, clinical, and all plot and forward narrative – usually my favorite kind of novel. I enjoy the Parker novels, but this one was just so-so in the series.

Audience and interaction – ignore the cynical and skeptical pundits who regulary write things like, “Google+ is a Ghost Town” “Google+’s audience is strictly techie or geeks or photographers.” Guy Kawasaki, a passionate Google+ fan, made an interesting note about audience. Facebook claims to have 1 billion users, but with Facebook’s various content gating and restrictions (see below for more discussion) your content is usually only shared with 10% of Facebook’s audience. So, really, Facebook’s audience is only 100 million. If you share something publicly on Google+, your content has the chance to be seen by 235 million+ active users. So, who has the larger audience actually? (And, yes, that’s a really rough estimate re: numbers, but the basic point is solid.) By the way, do you know any ghost towns with 235 million active residents? I don’t, but we digress.

As for the argument that Google+’s audience being strictly tech-oriented. Simply not true. How do I know? I’m a guy who happens to make quilts. When Google+ recently launched communities, I created a Google+ Quilting community. The community now has 300+ members, daily active conversations all about quilting – no tech discussions whatsoever. And, as a curiousity, I’ve looked through the profiles of many of those 300+ members, very few of them ever post or discuss anything tech related.

Deeper conversations – When I try to explain the appeal of Google+, I’ve often described it as “Twitter with a more elegant user interface, beautiful photos, and great conversations.” Yes, I understand the appeal and novelty of Twitter’s 140 character limitation. But, personally, I find it awkward, stilted, and a pain in the ass most times. With Google+, you don’t have to contort yourself to talk in 140-character snippets. As a result, conversations can take their natural course without having to constantly edit your responses into a 140-character straightjacket.

International audience – I know from Facebook’s stats that they have huge numbers of international users. As an American with only a handful of friends in foreign countries, I rarely (never) see or interact with Facebook’s international audience. Not so with Google+, I routinely have conversations with many people in other countries via Google+ who comment on posts, etc.

Non-reciprocal following – One of the things that drives the international discussions via Google+ was their decision to build the platform with non-reciprocal following. Unlike Facebook, I don’t have to approve someone as a friend before they can see my Google+ content and posts. This is powerful. Anything I share publcily has the potential to be seen (as in Twitter) by anyone else using Google+. What about spam, I can hear people shouting? It’s very rare, and I can easily block, mute or report people. If I block someone, they won’t be able to see my content in the future.

If I follow someone, I can see all their public content – Facebook encourages you to connect with friends, and then it promptly gates and blocks you from seeing those friends’ updates in your news feed. Show me ALL the content of the people I care about, and Google+ does just that. Anyone who uses Facebook regulary knows that Facebook’s EdgeRank algorithm is getting more and more strict. It’s pretty simple. If I follow someone and I like that person, I WANT TO SEE ALL THEIR POSTS in my stream. Don’t make me go hunting for that content from people that I care about and am interested in.

Businesses that have spent enourmous amounts of time and energy building a Facebook community have found themselves shut off and hidden from their passionate fans. Obviously, Zuckerberg and his team have their own long-term plan in mind, but right now it’s looking more and more like a walled garden/AOL-back-in-the-day approach that forces companies to pay through the nose to interact with their own fans. Of course, it’s Zuckerberg’s sandbox and he can make all the rules he wants. Mark Cuban explained it best.

With Google+, you don’t have this problem. You care about someone, you circle them, and you can easily see ALL their content. Very simple.

Photos – Google+’s photo experience is examplary. Beautiful, gorgeous slideshows. Again, Facebook could have taken this ball and run with it years ago. They know how important photos are to Facebook users, but alas, they fumbled the ball, and Google+ scooped it up. If you love photos, start using Google+ today – even if you end up sharing your Google+ albums to your friends via Facebook.

Google+ is rapidly integrating mobile and mobile photos too. I don’t have an Android, but I understand that the Google+ photo experience via Android is amazingly cool. I use the G+ iPhone app, and whenever I open the app, it will automatically (with my initial permission, of course) automatically upload any new photos on my Phone to my Google+ photos. They upload as private, hidden photos and I can share those photos based on my own preferences.

There are plenty of other reasons that I like Google+ – video Hangouts, circles, etc., but I’ll discuss those in a future post. For now, if you haven’t spent time on Google+, I would encourage you to give it a try. And don’t give up after 1 day. Commit to 10-15 minutes per day over the course of several weeks. If you do that, you may start to realize the power and allure of Google+.

What do you like or dislike about Google+?

Book^2 Campis an unconference. For the unitiated, with an unconference there is absolutely no set agenda or speakers prior to the event. A group of 100+ publishing executives gathered in a Soho office space and people suggested ideas for discussions. Those ideas – written down – were then taped to a grid and attendees decided what conversations/discussions piqued their interest. Again, for the unitiated, it can sound somewhat like chaos, but I’ve attended many unconferences and find the level of conversation and discussion extremely rewarding and though-provoking. Book2Camp was no exception.

And, as many people have mentioned on Twitter, the many conversations were the best part of the day.

I met new people and spoke to many people I’ve met previously, including:

Levi Asher – Levi publishes the site Literary Kicks, and he’s published several ebooks, including: The Cards I’m Playing: Poker and Postmodern Literature, Why Ayn Rand is Wrong (And Why It Matters), and others.

Levi organized the session – Surviving and Thriving as an eBook Publisher – that I participated in. I look forward to reading more of Literary Kicks and conversing with Levi on Twitter.

Philip Turner – Philip and I attended many of the same sessions. When we spoke during a break, I was beyond excited to discover that Philip published Edward Robb Ellis’ Diary of a Century when he worked at Kodansha. The late Edward Robb Ellis, a Midwesterner who moved to New York City and worked for a variety of newspapers, wrote a volumnious diary for his entire life. If you’ve never heard of A Diary of the Century: Tales By America’s Greatest Diarist, I wholeheartedly recommend tracking the book down. The book features excerpts from Ellis’ diary throughout the years and is a wonderful look at one man’s life. I also loved the book becuase Ellis love for New York City shone through.

Ardal Powell – Ardal is the CEO of Music Word Media Group. I didn’t speak to Ardal for long, but I’m interested in learning more about Music Word Media and what he’s working on.

Jim Hanas – Jim is the author of Why They Cried and is at the forefront of digital publishing and eBooks. Hanas learned a lot of valuable insight in the eBook trenches – giving away thousands of electronic copies of his book. Hanas presented at the first Book Camp and reportered actual numbers. You can read more about Hanas’ presentation and ebook knowledge here.

Tobias Buckell – I hadn’t seen Tobias in person since we attended a Writers of the Future writing workshop in Los Angeles in 2001. If you’re a science fiction fan, you should be reading Tobias’ novels and shorts stories. Over the years, I’ve been extremely impressed by Tobias’ approach to book publishing and making a living as a writer. He was in town to talk about Kickstarter at O’Reilly’s Tools of Change conference.

Ann Kingman and Michael Kindness – the co-hosts of Books on the Nightstand, a wonderful books and reading podcast, and Random House sales reps. It’s always great to see Ann and Michael in person and have a chance to discuss books and book publishing. And, if you’re not listening to Books on the Nightstand, you really should be. At this point, there are tons of previous episodes to fill your podcast listening time for weeks. Fair warning – your wallet will suffer if you listen for long, because you simply can’t listen without scribbling down at least 2-3 books to buy per episode.

Erica Barmash – Erica is the Senior Marketing Manager at Harper Perennial. We met last year at the Book Blogger Convention and have traded various Tweets throughout the year. Erica is also deep into planning her wedding for the NYC Courthouse. My wife and I got married on a barge in Red Hook, Brooklyn, and it’s always fun to hear people’s wedding and wedding preparation stories.

David Wilk – According to his business card, David is the Head Trickster at Booktrix. We attended many of the same sessions, and it was definitely interesting hearing about David’s eBook publishing experience.

Again, Book2Camp was all about the people and conversations. There were a lot of people passionately discussing books, reading, the future of independent bookstores and the future of book publishing – exactly my kind of people.

As the founder of Delabarre Publishing, I attended Book^2. I’ve been a lifelong, voracious reader. I worked in a variety of bookstores in college and post-college. I worked in book publishing for 3.5 years when I worked at the Denise Marcil Literary Agency in NYC. And, since August 2010, I’ve been actively and successfully publishing a wide variety of eBooks.

There were multiple tracks of discussions going on throughout the afternoon, so I can only report/discuss the conversations I participated in.

Surviving and Thriving as an eBook publisher – Organized by Levi Asher of Literary Kicks, I spent some time discussing my ebook publishing experiences. I enjoyed hearing from others in the trenches of eBook publishing – including Harlequin Books’ successful eBook publishing imprint Carina Press.

Some of the issues we discussed, included:

• eBook pricing strategies,
• the challenges of eBook publishing and production even for large publishers where some executives believe that eBook publishing should as simple as hitting one button with a book file you already have,
• the “black boxes” of most eBook marketplaces – Amazon, BN, etc.. Data would be invaluable for book publishers – how many people are downloading eBook samples, how many of those samples converted to sales, which other book did a buyer purchase or browse prior to buying your eBook? That type of data would be invaluable, but for now, it’s just not there.

 Publishers – what are they good for. Non-fiction book marketing without bricks-and-mortar

Will mainstream book buyers purchase a book based on a publishers’ brand? Some argued that average consumers don’t pay attention to who published a book – they’re simply looking for content re: a specific topic. Others pointed to the example of Chronicle Books or Workman as distinctive publishing brands that people recognize. Again, I’m not sure if we’re recognizing those brands because we’re people who eat, sleep, and dream books.

We also discussed the visibility and branding of editors – so that ultimately consumers could make purchasing decisions based on an editor’s reputation and influence and taste. Ann Kingman made the point that whenever this issue is discussed there is often resistance, but this type of branding/marketing of editors as tastemakers hasn’t been tried in a sustained, consistent way.

Handselling in the digital age – I may have the exact title of this session wrong. We discussed how hand selling works both offline by independent bookstores – and how that can translate digitally.

While the people in the room are intimately familiar with digital affiliate programs whether via Amazon or Indiebound, etc. and make purchasing decisions accordingly, many consumers and book buyers aren’t aware of the impact of buying a title from Amazon vs. an independent. I think there was condense that the higher degree of friction involved in purchasing a book from a digital recommendation, the more likelihood that a buyer will opt for the easiest ordering process. Unfortunately, for independents, that’s often Amazon. Amazon has credit card info, shipping addresses for millions of customers.

In the future, digital hand selling could benefit independents even more if there was a frictionless affiliate/recommendation program connecting independents with online book recommendations. We’re not there yet.

Other things we discussed:

• Book subscription plans in many variations, including RJ Julia’s Just the Right Book.
• Curation – can you make a living curating or will it be done purely out of passion? (I think it will be a combination. I think some “curators” will be able to turn their passion and knowledge about a certain niche or speciality into a job while some will do this strictly out of passion and enthusiasm – such as the many book bloggers who spend hours each week reviewing and writing about books.

If you’re interested in the future of books and book publishing, I recommend that you search twitter for #book2 and read the many comments from Book2Camp.

Others are already writing about their Book2Camp experiences as well:

Dan Blank

Guy LeCharles Gonzalez

Nishan Stepak

Patti Henderson

I’m a long time listener of the Books on the Nightstand podcast. Last year, Books on the Nightstand organized a weekend retreat in Manchester, Vermont – a weekend of books, authors readings, and camaraderie. As part of the weekend, Ann Kingman and Michael Kindness, the hosts of Books on the Nightstand arranged to publish a book via the Northshire Bookstore’s Espresso book-printing machine – Two Books I Can’t Wait For You To Read. The book was designed as a collection of two book recommendations from every person attending the retreat.

Like a lot of Books on the Nightstand listeners, when Ann and Michael emailed the retreat attendees about the Two Books I Can’t Wait For You To Read book and asked us to send in our two books, I froze. I’m a passionate, voracious reader, and over the years I’ve read LOTS of books. How can I only recommend two, I thought?

In the end, I actually cheated, because with the two books that I recommended, I included a series – The Song of Ice and Fire by George R R Martin. Currently, that series has five books.

So, what would be my second recommendation? Would it be Robert R. McCammon’s elegiac coming-of-age novel – Boy’s Life? Would it be one of John Irving’s wonderful novels? Or, would it be The Lost Regiment series by William Forstchen, a pulp-adventure series chronicling the battles and adventures of a civil war regiment transported to a fantasy world? Genre, escapist fiction? Sure. But a series that I’ve reread multiple times and have enjoyed. Or, would I recommend one of the best memoirs I’ve ever read – Self Portrait with Turtles by David Carroll? Carroll’s love of nature and his obsession with turtles suffuses every glorious page.

In the end, I recommended Clark Howard’s Hard City. A book, that when I submitted it to Ann and Michael, was out of print. And, a book that, as of this writing is now available to readers again as an eBook. And, I had a hand in getting Hard City republished as an eBook

Let me explain.

Hard City was published in 1990 in hardcover by Dutton, a New York City publishing company. Unfortunately, as some books do, Hard City never really found its audience. It did find one reader though — me. In 1990, I was in college at the University of Georgia in Athens, Georgia. Being a bibliophile, I usually visited the college library two or three times a week. Not to study per se, but to browse the fiction shelves. Not only did the University of Georgia library offer new release fiction and non-fiction, but they had a deep collection of fiction.

One day, I was checking out the new releases, and I spotted Hard City. The front cover wasn’t particularly eye-catching, but I glanced at the description and decided to give it a try. I’m glad I did.

Hard City, which I discovered after reading was semi-autobiographical of Howard’s life, features Richie, a young, preteen boy from a troubled family, who lives on the streets of 1940s Chicago while sleeping in a bowling alley every night. Richie’s love of reading is key to Richie’s surviving, and eventually leaving, the street life.

 Writing about Hard City in a new Author’s Preface for the publication of Hard City as an ebook, Howard writes, “Because much of it is based on my life as a wayward boy on the mean streets of Chicago’s lower West Side, a life frequently fueled by truancy, petty thievery, gang membership, and other disreputable behavior, I had, as a respectable adult, left those bleak days far behind and buried them deep in my memory. The things I had done back then, the life I had experienced, as well as vivid recollections of my mother’s drug addiction and my father’s incarceration in federal prison and subsequent disappearance, had all melded together into some dark recess of my mind and, I thought, been locked away forever.”

Richie’s love of reading and how ultimately, that love of reading, genuinely changed his life, spoke to me on a deep level. I attribute many of the positive things that I’ve achieved in my life, thus far, to my love of reading from an early age. As so many people have written, books opened up a whole new world for me – a world of travel, exotic foods, and the central idea that learning about new people and places either via fiction or non-fiction doesn’t have to be dull or boring – it can be enriching, relaxing and fun.

Clark Howard is an award winning and acclaimed mystery writer. In 1981, his story The Horn Man won the Edgar Allan Poe award for best short story of the year from the Mystery Writers of America. In 2009, Howard won the Edward D. Hoch Memorial Golden Derringer Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Short Fiction Mystery Society.

So, why is Hard City now available as an eBook, when the book was out of print and basically forgotten when I submitted the title to Ann and Michael? After I submitted my two books to Michael and Ann, I was looking at my bookshelf one day, and I started thinking, “I know Hard City is out of print. What if . . . ” On the basis of several short stories I’ve sold, I’m a member of the Mystery Writers of America. I grabbed the MWA’s annual membership book that lists contact info for MWA members, and I found Clark Howard’s info, including his email address.

I promptly fired off an email explaining how much Hard City had meant to me over the years, and what a shame it would be for the book to remain out of print and basically lost to a new generation of readers. As a frantic parent with two young boys and a busy schedule, I basically forgot about my email. Three weeks later, on a cold January 2011 afternoon, I got a call on my phone. I didn’t recognize the number, but I picked up anyway. It was Clark Howard with a simple message, “I’d love to work with you.”

Now, Hard City is widely available again as an eBook. It’s currently available for the Amazon Kindle, Barnes & Noble Nook, Apple’s iBookstore, and Kobo. For those who missed Hard City’s hardback publication in 1990, you now have the chance to share Richie’s life on the streets of Chicago, and his ultimate redemption via books, reading, and writing.

On to more questions.

Q. What is the PR industry’s reputation today? How do other industries view Public Relations as a practice? Is PR being taken seriously everywhere? How has this changed in the past few years (if at all)?

A. I’ll answer this two ways. First, and this is just my personal approach to life – not just public relations – I don’t spend any time contemplating or thinking too much about how people view public relations. I’m usually too busy working to think about what someone may or may not think of the public relations industry. And the reality is that there will always be negative people, and I long ago realized that life’s just too short to spend much time trying to change people’s opinions about public relations – or politics.

Second, you can point to a wide number of public “scandals” that people blame on public relations. BP’s numerous communication mistakes after the Gulf oil spill. The current Penn State crisis (I’d be willing to be there was a PR person involved at some point – giving horrible advice on preserving Penn State’s “image.”) There are PR mistakes made every single day, just as there are business mistakes made every day, journalism/reporting mistakes made every day, etc.

Those mistakes should not – and frankly – don’t define the industry as a whole. Do they give PR a black eye? Absolutely. Do they invalidate all the honest, hard PR work going on every day, nope.

For me, it all boils down to what I bring to the table for the companies I work with. Companies, especially, startups live inside a bubble. That bubble is necessary to design software, sling code, and ship product. However, that bubble leads companies to believe that they’re doing life-changing, totally revolutionary work. While that might be the case, reporters need and thrive on context. Where does company X fit into the overall industry landscape, what about their product is truly unique, and what is similar to competitors?

It’s my job to work with companies to tell a compelling story about their product or service within the context of the overall industry and the overall news conversation of the week or month. To me, that’s honest, fun work, and I sleep soundly every night regardless of what some person or persons may be ranting about the ills of the PR industry.

Q. What is the most valuable skill for recent PR grads looking for a job today?

A. I touched on this in my earlier post answering these questions. My biggest piece of advice, and I can’t stress it enough is DON’T WAIT.

If you’ve investigated PR, and you think you’d like to work in the industry, DON’T WAIT.

DON’T WAIT – for professors to insist that you be well read and well-informed on daily news. Even if you plan to go into celebrity or entertainment PR, every PR professional should be reading every single day – the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and USA Today (at a minimum). Those newspapers, along with the Washington Post and LA Times drive the news conversations of the day and the week.

If you’re reading newspapers and blogs every single day, you can start to make connections and see how the companies and organizations you’re working for can fit into the ongoing news conversation.

DON’T WAIT – to learn digital content creation. Build a blog. If you don’t consider yourself technical, there are literally tons of online tutorials for people who are “non-technical”. Figure out what you’re interested in, and start writing about, recording video commentaries, start an audio podcast. Begin building your audience today. Those skills will be invaluable and required for PR professionals.

DON’T WAIT – to get PR experience. Sure, pursue internships and participate fully in any classroom assignments, but you can start gaining PR experience today. In every town, in every city, there are tons of worthwhile organizations – charities, non-profits – desperate for PR help. Help them build or revamp their website. Volunteer to help them with their Twitter, Facebook, Google+ strategies. Help introduce them to local media and local news reporters. Write press releases for them.

Classroom experience is valuable, but in-the-trenches PR experience and learning how to build an audience online and interact with that audience are invaluable talents and skills that will help you gain your first job in PR – and succeed and thrive over the long haul.

Let’s get started.

Q. Are PR jobs increasing today? Is the terminology for these jobs changing (maybe there’s a new buzzword, like “Media Manager” or “Communications Director” that is becoming more common)?

A. First, I don’t know the actual stats about overall PR jobs increasing or decreasing. I could go and look up those stats, but I thought I’d answer from my own perspective. In my PR career, I have focused on public relations/marketing for companies at the intersection of technology, media, and marketing. Currently, I don’t see any decrease in the need for skilled PR professionals.

Technology and digital companies need help marketing their products, apps, and software. Whether you work internally at a company or externally for a PR or advertising agency, someone has to work to market the company’s product within the marketplace.

As the media continues it’s rapid and continous transformation, someone has to be able to negotiate the media landscape and figure out the infleuncers within an industry that should be writing about a company or product. Usually, that’s a PR person.

There are several trends within marketing/pr that point to strong opportunties for the future:

Social media – While many people may argue about whether or not PR should “own” social media within companies, thus far it has often fallen to PR to figure out a company’s social media strategy – especially when responding to external criticisms and complaints.

Regardless of who ends up “owning” social media from a corporate perspective, the skilled PR practioners of the future will have their own social media audiences/influencers. I would recommend that young PR people not “wait” for a boss or superior to suggest that the get active in social media. Start now to build your own audience via social media – beyond your circle of friends and classmates.

Apps - App marketplaces are growing. But companies and developers all face the same dilemma – how do we get attention for our app when there are hundreds of new apps released every single week.

It’s a conundrum. But, I would argue PR can help move the needle with app downloads and attention. That’s why I co-founded APPetite PR last year.

Content creators – Many PR/marketers are beginning to realize that the rules have changed. If a company has limited marketing dollars, they can’t create advertising camapigns that “scream” at their audience via digital and tradtional ads. With inbound marketing, companies can create their own content – blogs, infographics, podcasts, videos – to drive awareness of their unique products and services.

While most companies understand the power of inbound marketing, they struggle with creating content. And, if they create it, they may create it for 3 or 4 weeks, and then abandon the effort amid competing priorotories. It has been proven, time and time again, the companies that set up a regular schedule and crank out useful, powerful content over and over again, end up dominating search results and building a powerful community of fans – and sell more products, software, or apps.

If you’re a PR student, and this appeals to you. Again, don’t wait! Don’t do one assignment for a class and hope that that will work for your resume. Practice content creation now. Start your own blog, write blog articles consistently. Try other forms of media creation – videos, audio podcasts, etc.

If you’re looking for a PR job and can point employers to a thriving blog that you’ve built and nourished, you’re going to stand out among potential employees.

Here’s the news that I’ve been paying attention to this past week:

Google Reader – To the dismay of many devoted Google Reader users, Google decided to shut down the sharing and social features within Google Reader and are pushing users to share stories via Google+. Regardless of what you think about Google+ (I happen to enjoy it a lot), Google could have opted to allow people to continue using the Google Reader social features unchanged. They did not. Many people are mad, and you can read about here, here, and here.

Hivemined – Thankfully, some passionate Google Reader users – and coders – are working hard on Hivemined – an open-sourced web-based RSS Reader with the social features that die-hard Google Reader users loved.

#SearchLove – I attended the SearchLove conference in New York City earlier this week. SearchLove is a conference organized by Distilled, a top SEO firm, and it features advanced SEO strategies and tactics. You can read this, this, and this article for a recap of SearchLove’s great info.

LunchMeet - (client) With the new LunchMeet app, you’ll never have to eat lunch alone again, and you can expand your professional network over lunch. Check out this NextWeb article about LunchMeet.

The true question here is, “Would Amazon have agreed to install air conditioners in their Pennsylvania warehouse if an industrious reporter hadn’t written about the appalling conditions in Amazon’s warehouses?” I don’t think they would have. 

A couple of caveats or notes:

1. I’m a long-time Amazon user. And when I say I use Amazon, I’m a SERIOUS Amazon user. I ordered a 36-inch screen TV from Amazon in the late 1990s the first day they debuted their electronics store. Wow. That was an experience. They were using contract delivery companies. These two guys showed up to my apartment in Brooklyn, and I had to help them lug a monstrously heavy TV up 3 flights of stairs. 

I order lots of staples from Amazon – toilet paper, etc. – from their Ship and Save program.

2. I make money from Amazon. I publish eBooks via Delabarre Publishing, and I publish via Amazon Kindle.

With that out of the way, the conditions in Amazon’s warehouses are truly horrific. If you haven’t read the original Morning Call story, it’s worth a read.

I’ll recap a couple of the things that leaped out at me.

1. They start every shift by threatening to fire workers if they can’t keep up. Imagine that.

2. They hire boatloads of temporary employees with a promise of full-time Amazon employment with requisite benefits. Then, as these guys bust their asses to try and make full-time, Amazon management does things like double their metrics overnight. If you have to pick 250 items per day, suddenly they say, “You now have to pick 500 items per day.” And the full-time goal gets further and further away.

3. Amazon would routinely line up ambulances outside their warehouses to cart off workers who collapsed from heat exhaustion. Yes, you read that sentence correctly. 

4. Until this story appeared and customers started complaining, Amazon refused to install A/C inside their warehouses.

Here’s a few things that I think about Amazon.

1. I’m completely serious here. They should hire Tony Dungy immediately and implement his suggestions for coaching and leadership. Again, I’m not joking. Tony Dungy is a Super Bowl-winning coach – who won games without the histrionics, screaming and intimidation common among football coaches. He could teach Amazon management a thing or two about inspiration leadership.

2. This is the most important issue here. Many people, including Warren Buffet, have said, the true content of a person or company’s character and intentions is what they do when no one is looking. When there’s no possibility of someone knowing about your actions, how do you act? Well, sadly, we know now how Amazon acts when no one is looking.

I’m 100% convinced if this article had not been published, no air conditioner would have been installed.

3. For the next 6 months, Jeff Bezos and Bezos’ wife and children should spend 1 day a week working on the front lines of Amazon’s Pennsylvania warehouse. Subjected to the insane metrics for getting a full-time Amazon job, subjected to the threats of being fired at the beginning of every shift, subjected to the brutal, suffocating heat.

Amazon, Bezos, the ball is in your court. What will your next step be? Will we get more platitude-filled press releases? Or will your company use this opportunity for true change in the way that you treat your warehouse workers?

Here’s a current list of gadgets and technology between my wife and I: two MacBook Pro laptops, an Alienware laptop, a MacMini that we use in conjunction with an external hard drive for storing photos and music, Xbox, Xbox Kinect, iPhone, Samsung Captivate (Android phone), Playstation 2, Wii, iPad, Kindle, iPod classic, and iPod touch. I bought a TiVo in its first year on the market. But, when our TiVo died, I ended up getting a basic DirecTV DVR, because there wasn’t a DirecTV/TiVo integrated set-top box available.

Four years ago, I switched from Windows and bought a MacBook, and I’ve never looked back. Over the years, I occasionally longed for a state-of-the-art gaming PC, because I love videogames, and there are still plenty of PC games that aren’t available for Mac. Yeah, yeah, I know that I can use bootcamp, and use Windows on my MacBook Pro. I fight for storage space on my MacBook Pro on a daily basis – without a Windows partition. Plus, I worried that with video games that tested the limits of Windows if I would have problems running Windows on my MacBook Pro without weird errors.

Recently, I decided to take the plunge, head back to the dark side for the sake of playing PC games, and I ordered an Alienware M17X laptop. Here are my thoughts/observations.

Tacky, plastic keyboard – You’re selling a premium product Alienware. I would venture to say that the laptop I bought is in the top 5% of premium-priced PC laptops. Why would you sell a laptop with a tacky, plastic keyboard? That’s not premium. After years of using a MacBook Pro, it’s painfully obvious every time I use the Alienware. A plastic keyboard and keys is tacky and cheap. Not a good decisions for a premium laptop.

Screen design – I was shocked when I opened up the Alienware, started loading some games, took a look at the screen and tried to push the screen all the way open, and the screen budged. The laptop won’t open beyond a straight 90% angle. I glanced in back, and the screen is designed in such a way that if you try to force the screen open beyond a 90% angle, you will break the laptop’s screen. What an abysmal design flaw. I often find myself bobbing and weaving my head in odd angles to look at the screen. Michael Dell you should horse whip the engineer who designed the screen for the Alienware M17X.

“Tech support” – Within 24 hours of opening up my Alienware, I was thrown back into the world of endless driver updates and arcane error messages. Again, a premium laptop in the top 5% of premium-priced PC laptops, and I immediately had to begin installing drivers. Awful. When I connected the Alienware to an external monitor (also purchased from Alienware/Dell), the audio from the laptop wouldn’t come through the external monitor. I hopped on Alienware’s tech support line, ready to try out Alienware’s stellar customer support, and I was promptly routed to an international boiler room, um, tech support center. Within five minutes, I heard something that completely stunned me. “We’re having a problem with this driver. We may need to reinstall Windows completely.” I think Michael Dell heard me screaming all the way from Massachusetts.

So, do I regret buying a state-of-the-art (with a tacky, plastic keyboard) Alienware? Unfortunately, I do. Years down the road, when I’m ready to buy another gaming machine, I’ll buy a MacBook Pro and run Windows from Bootcamp.

I really, really, really wanted to buy an Alienware and love the experience. However, I was reminded again that there’s only one computer company that understands how to build premium products.

During the first dot com boom, press release strategies for PR exploded in popularity. Dot com companies desperate for press attention pumped out press releases once or twice a week (or even more). Press releases about new hires, new buttons added to a website, new office pet policies at the company… It was out of control.

Consequently, a generation of entrepreneurs formed their opinion about public relations based on the part of the process that was visible to them – press releases distributed digitally by a variety of press release distribution companies. What many entrepreneurs and CMOs never saw were the short, one-on-one, relevant emails sent to specific, targeted reporters. Nor did they hear the phone conversations between reporters and PR professionals, again rooted in specific, relevant information of interest to what the reporter writes about on a daily basis – not desperate cold calls with information in which the reporter would never be interested.

History of press releases

Do you know how the concept of press releases began? Here’s a brief except from a SearchEngineWatch.com story noting the 100th birthday of the press release:

“On October 28, 1906, at least 50 people lost their lives when a three-car train of the Pennsylvania Railroad’s newly equipped electric service jumped a trestle at Atlantic City, NJ, and plunged into the Thoroughfare creek.”

That afternoon, Ivy Lee, who some consider to be the father of modern PR, created the first press release. The Pennsylvania Railroad was one of his clients. Following the accident, Lee not only convinced the railroad to distribute a public statement, he also convinced them to provide a special train to get reporters to the scene of the accident.

The New York Times was so impressed with this innovative approach to corporate communications that it printed the first press release—verbatim—on Oct. 30, 1906 as a “Statement from the Road.” In the weeks that followed, both newspapers and public officials effusively praised Pennsylvania Railroad for its openness and honesty.

PR would certainly be easy if the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and USA Today, etc., just printed your press release verbatim, but we all know that’s not the case.

SEO press release strategies?

Following the explosion of press releases during the dot com boom of the late 1990s, a new SEO press release strategy grew up. It started in the 2000s and continues today. Some SEO agencies and consultants followed press release tactics to boost a site’s natural search engine rankings by issuing lots of press releases with great anchor text links to a company’s website. As is typical with most SEO strategies, there are other SEO experts who disagree with press releases for SEO. I wanted to mention the concept of press releases for SEO purposes. However, using press releases for SEO is almost completely unrelated to using press releases with the intention of interesting a reporter, journalist or blogger to write about your company.

Reporters don’t care about press releases

Do reporters care about press releases? No. I have many friends who are reporters (and personal friends that I don’t approach about my clients). When discussing press releases, I often tell clients. I’ve never, ever heard a reporter say, “I can’t wait to open my email and read all the press releases that PR people sent me.” It just doesn’t happen. Why? Because 99.9% of press releases are written in a formal, stilted tone. They’re overwritten and often bury the importance of the announcement in formal language. Despite the pleas of numerous PR professionals and David Meerman Scott’s excellent and impassioned Gobbldeygook Manifesto, CMOs just can’t help including industry buzzwords like “best of breed,” “robust,” etc. Reporters don’t read those words. It’s that simple. If they read the release at all, they literally mentally block out those buzzwords, and they try to decipher the formal language, as they ask themselves, “Is there something here that I should care about?”

If reporters don’t care about press releases, what should you do? Relevant, targeted emails and phone calls. Relevant = news that is of direct interest to the types of stories that a reporter writes and what they care about. If a reporter doesn’t write a personnel column, don’t ever send them an email about new executive hires. If a reporter only writes about a vendor from the perspective of a company using that vendor, with specific success stats, then don’t send the reporter news strictly about a vendor. If you’re a vendor or a PR person working a vendor, don’t pick up the phone or send an email to the reporter until you’ve got a client who is using the product ready to talk – and with some stats to back up what you’re saying.

5 Sentence Email Rule

If you’re sending emails to a reporter, remember the 5 sentence email rule. Don’t send a reporter a multi-page press release. Keep your email to five sentences. You can learn more about the five sentence email rule here and here. Reporters, more than just about anyone else, are deluged, bombarded, and inundated with emails. If you follow the 5 sentence email rule with anyone, it should be in the emails that you send reporters.

On that note, don’t forget the importance of your email subject line. Yes, reporters often delete emails strictly based on subject lines. Write, revise, and re-revise your subject lines until you have a compelling subject line that piques a reporter’s interest.

Finally, is there any use for press releases? Certainly. Press releases are very effective tools to convey information – not to reporters, but to potential clients and potential partners. When potential clients and partners reach your website and start exploring the “About Us” section, press releases can give them a very good idea of what your company is doing and what your products are capable of (in addition to your marketing/sales info).

How do you use press releases to market/publicize your company?

(The image for this blog post is from the Sweet Smell of Success from 1957. If you work in the PR industry and you haven’t seen this movie, stop what you’re doing and rent it now. From IMDB.com, “Powerful but unethical Broadway columnist J.J. Hunsecker coerces unscrupulous press agent Sidney Falco into breaking up his sister’s romance with a jazz musician.”)

Since launching my podcast, I’ve recorded and released 36 episodes of the Reading and Writing Podcast - a podcast where I interview writers and authors about their books and their writing habits. I’ve interviewed primarily commercial fiction writers – thrillers, mysteries, science fiction, etc. I also recorded and released four episodes of the Book Marketing podcast – a podcast that I’m in the process of reviving as both a video and audio podcast.

I’ve had several people ask me about the specific steps that I follow in recording and producing a podcast. Here they are.

Recording – I use my MacBook Pro to record my podcasts. I conduct the interviews via Skype using eCamm Call Recorder software to record the interviews. My preference is that the author use Skype as well, and we do a Skype-to-Skype call – the audio clarity on Skype-to-Skype calls is much, much better. However, most authors don’t use Skype, so I end up using Skype’s call-out feature to call the author’s phone. I use an Alesis USB microphone for recording, but I’d love to get a higher quality microphone – maybe a Heil PR-40.

Post-production – When I finish the interview on Skype, I have a .mov file. I use a piece of software that comes with eCamm Call Recorder to split the conversation/interview into two files. I end up with two .mov files. Next, I use video conversion software to convert those two .move files into .wav files – files that Garageband will recognize and use. After I’ve converted the files into. wav format, I then run both files through The Levelator – free software that automatically cuts out the high and low volumes. I’m not an audiophile, and I may not be explaining The Levelator correctly. What it does simply is eliminate the volume increasing and decreasing dramatically on my audio interviews. I’ve listened to many podcasts who needed to use The Levelator badly. I constantly have to adjust the volume on my stereo because one person’s voice is very loud and the other person’s voice is lower. The Levelator eliminates all that.

Garageband – Again, I’m using a Mac, so I use Garageband for editing. I usually open the previous episode’s Garageband file, rename the file for the new episode, and then drag the two .wav files into Garageband. I reuse the previous episode’s file, because I reuse the segues and various sound files from episode to episode. My other Garageband editing consists of – cutting off the beginning and end of the audio files of the interviews where I’m talking to the author and explaining how the podcast works, etc. I also record a new intro each episode, and I do that recording from directly within Garageband using the USB mic.

MP3 - When my editing is complete, I export the file from Garageband as an MP3. Then, I use MP3 ID3X to edit the MP3 file’s metadata  - I add a JPEG image of my podcast’s logo, I write Title, Artist, Album, and all the metadata that will eventually show up in whatever device or software someone is using to listen to the podcast.

Uploading – When I finish editing the MP3′s metadata, I upload the file to Libysn – the service that I use for hosting my podcast’s MP3 audio files. Once, I’ve successfully

It’s alive – Once I’ve successfully uploaded the MP3 file to Libsyn, I open WordPress for my podcast’s website – www.readingandwritingpodcast.com – and I write a new post describing the podcast’s content, links to the writer’s website, and, of course, links to the MP3 interview files hosted by Libsyn.

Feedburner - The final step. I ping feedburner. At one time, I also followed the feedburner ping with pinging the iTunes store (basically sending the iTunes store a signal that a new episode of my podcast was available for people who had subscribed to the podcast via iTunes.) However, in the past several months Apple has eliminated the pinging ability for iTunes. Yet, it doesn’t take long before the new episode is showing up in iTunes. (iTunes crawl’s my podcast’s feed and whenever it sees a new podcast, iTunes lists the episode in their directory and to anyone who had previously subscribed to the podcast.

With that, I’m done and the podcast is available for listeners.

What’s your podcasting post-production process?

However, many companies unfortunately spend so much time every day immersed in the verbal and written shorthand of their company, it’s often difficult for them to communicate about their business in a way that’s easy to understand and easy to comprehend what makes their company truly unique.

I’ve repeatedly had discussions with clients about communicating with reporters or drafting an initial press release about a new service or product. I repeatedly use the “cocktail party” example. You need to be able to explain what your company does as if you were meeting a group of people at a cocktail party and they ask you what your company does and they have zero technical knowledge. Some might call it an elevator pitch. Regardless of what you call it, it’s invaluable. If you can’t explain in 2-3 concise sentences the compelling reason for your service or product, in plain English that a technical newbie can understand, you’ve got a problem. You should spend the time necessary to perfect that explanation, because busy consumers and potential customers or users won’t give you a second chance.

On more than one occasion, I’ve gotten into serious disagreements with clients about the tone and style of press releases. Some business executives equate a stiff, formal corporate tone in a press release as somehow imparting gravitas to a company’s announcement. I just don’t agree. Stiff, formal corporate communications is simply a holdover from an antiquated approach to corporate communications.

Richard Millington, the founder of FeverBee Limited, an online community consultancy, recently wrote about this issue specifically related to companies communicating to their online communities. Take a look at Millington’s post for a hilarious – and painful – example of how one company tried to communicate with their online fans.

Warren Buffett, the unparalleled investor, has long championed plain English to discuss complex financial matters. In 1998, Warren Buffett wrote the introduction to an SEC document about how to write clear SEC disclosure documents. (As an aside, the SEC obviously has its limits on “informal” communications to investors. Revealed in Steven Levy’s new book about Google, In the Plex, the SEC wasn’t pleased with Google’s IPO filings because of the founders informal and unorhtodox letter to potential investors. The SEC ordered multiple revisions.)

Here’s a portion of Buffett’s intro:

“One unoriginal but useful tip: Write with a specific person in mind. When writing Berkshire Hathaway’s annual report, I pretend that I’m talking to my sisters. I have no trouble picturing them: Though highly intelligent, they are not experts in accounting or finance. They will understand plain English, but jargon may puzzle them. My goal is simply to give them the information I would wish them to supply me if our positions were reversed. To succeed, I don’t need to be Shakespeare; I must, though, have a sincere desire to inform.

No siblings to write to? Borrow mine: Just begin with “Dear Doris and Bertie.””

Takeaways:

- Can you explain what your company does in 2-3 easy to understand, yet compelling, sentences? If not, write, revise, and redraft, until you can.

- Is your insider knowledge of your company and industry creeping into your press releases and content on your web site? Ask a spouse or friend – in a completely different line of work – to take a look at a recent press release or website redesign and give you their feedback. Can they easily understand what you’re trying to say?

- Does your company’s press releases and external communications have a stiff, formal style? Question that style? Why are you writing that way? The goal of communicating is to be easily understood.

Some of the comments to Saas’ story are interesting. I wonder if some of the people commenting are communications professionals? It’s unrealistic to expect PR people to go out on boats to fight the oil spill or deploy floating booms to try and stop the spread of the oil.

What BP’s communications team could have done is communicate often, early, and authentically – to convey information about what BP is doing to fight the oil spill. Sure, this post’s title references social media, and Saas’ article is focused on BP’s use of social media. Yet, social media is simply one of many tools enabling companies and brands to communicate with during a crisis.

So what could BP have done using their social media tools?

1. Have a crisis PR plan. Very important. When the shit hits the fan, which it will eventually with any company regardless of size, you need a written crisis PR plan that you’ve a) written down, b) reviewed with the entire management team, and c) that you read at least once a month and update as necessary.

2. Own their brand on Twitter. Duh. Currently twitter.com/BP belongs to some dude named Bryan Pendleton. It sure makes it hard to communicate on Twitter if you haven’t even secured the Twitter ID that most people will look for if they’re trying to find your company or brand. Would you know to search for BP_America on Twitter? I wouldn’t and I doubt most others would either.

3. Use the social media tools in your toolbox. Don’t be afraid to engage even if you’re delivering bad news. In the end, people will hate you more if you stonewall vs. delivering whatever news you’ve got. And, yes, I understand that when you have a burning oil platform that’s threatening to sink, you may not have all the information that you’d like to have. You might not be able to answer every question.

The Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded on April 20th. There was nary a tweet from BP America concerning the explosion until April 27th. 7 days? On second thought, maybe BP America should just cancel their Twitter account. 7 days is completely and totally unacceptable.

4. Engage, engage, engage – overcommunicate. When the oil rig exploded, and the company’s emergency responders arrived on the scene and assessed the damage, the crisis PR plan should have been enacted immediately.

If you think the crisis will be as large as the BP America oil spill, create a dedicated news-update page on your website with a prominent link on your home page.

Write a media alert encapsulating the basic facts that you know. Issue the media alert, set up interviews for your CEO regardless if all he can say is we know 2 facts – here they are. “The oil rig is burning, and we’re working hard to control the flames, and that’s the extent of my knowledge.”

Post the media alert on your website – run it by an in-house SEO specialist or your SEO consultant to maximize keywords and phrases that people will be using to search for information about the oil spill. Tweet links to the media alert every 30 minutes. Update your Facebook page (you don’t have a Facebook page? Create one on the fly!) with the text of the media alert and a link to your web page.

Record a video with your CEO articulating the key facts that you know. Upload the video to all the video sites you can via Tubemogul or directly with each site. Tweet links to the video on YouTube every 30 minutes. Link the video on your Facebook page. Embed the video on your dedicated crisis response PR page.

Rinse, repeat every 2-3 hours with a new media alert, again articulating the facts that you know. Yes, I’m very aware that BP is a profitable, public company and there are lawyers screaming that nothing should be said. Hopefully, you’re a CMO or CEO who will ignore the lawyers and communicate. Not take blame for things that are not your fault. C-o-m-m-u-n-i-c-a-t-e — What you know and what you are doing to deal with the issue.

5. Social media emergency squad – Break out the coffee and haul in the mattresses. For a crisis the size of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion, you’re crisis PR team is going to be spending a lot of time and energy communicating via social media.

Every piece of content that I mentioned above, Twittering links, posting videos to YouTube and multiple video sites, Facebook page updates, has the potential to create comments – both negative and positive. Roll up your sleeves and get to work. Respond to those comments as a representative of your company. Leave the corporate speak behind and talk informally. Not unprofessionally, informally – there is a difference. Again, tell what you know and what you’re doing.

Don’t even think of pulling a Nestle – criticizing and being sarcastic with your critics. If it makes you feel better, acknowledge their anger and state the facts as you know them.

6. Hashtag response – A continuation of the previous bullet. Monitor relevant hashtags – #BP #Oilspill #GulfCoastdisaster #Greedyoilexecs – and respond as outlined above. Yes, respond, individually and repeatedly. Is that over kill? Maybe. But do you want to make a full-scale communications response to a crisis? If so, then you need to be communicating where people are communicating – comment sections, Twitter, Facebook, etc.

Again, use common sense here. Don’t get into back-and-forth arguments with someone via Twitter if they’re not going to be convinced that you’re conveying facts and information. Now’s not the time to engage in a public debate about global petroleum usage. Respond once, maybe twice, then move on.

7. Wikipedia – Keep an eye on your Wikipedia page. If critics of your company jump in with inaccurate information, correct the page with citation.

8. Convey volunteer information – this is potentially risky, but it’s worth mentioning. As we all now sadly know, the Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion and the resulting oil spill is a monumental environmental disaster, and it’s frankly beyond the scope of BP America and its employees to contain the damage of the oil on wildlife.

BP could regularly post via their website and social media channels volunteer opportunities for people to help with the disaster relief.

Those are my crisis PR strategies for BP America written in about an hour. But, I’ve written more than one crisis PR plan, and utilizing social media tools for crisis PR is something I’ve been thinking about – and using.

The big question is, what would you add? What would you have done differently? How would your advice differ? I’d love to hear from you.

In the absence of “news,” many companies go radio silent, but silence can be deadly. If your company isn’t generating consistent media coverage, it’s inevitable in today’s 24-7 news cycle that your current clients and potential clients will soon ask, “What’s going on with company X? I never see them mentioned anywhere.”

But what do you do if your company doesn’t have any hard news to announce? Do you scrape the bottom of the barrel and issue a press release touting existing features that have already been announced? One sure way to alienate reporters is to send them non-news. Eventually, reporter will see your number on their voicemail or your name in their email, and they’ll say, “Who cares.”

Yet, in the absence of news, why not make your company a “resource” for reporters? Most smart companies watch their vertical and marketplace like a hawk. They try to stay up-to-date on what their customers and potential customers needs are – either anecdotally or through original research.

Why not take the extra step, tap into the research and knowledge that exists in your company, and package that data for reporters. By initiating a data-driven PR strategy, you become a go-to resource for reporters.

What does data-driven PR look like exactly?

I once worked with a company that had developed proprietary technology to track streaming radio content across the web and determine how many people were listening. Nielsen, the traditional media measurement service, had not yet developed a comparable technology or rating service. The PR team I was working with recommended that our client package their streaming tracking data akin to Nielsen’s traditional tracking of terrestrial radio stations. Each week, the company released a Top 10 Internet Radio Streams ranked by listenership and popularity.

Once we convinced the company to develop this branded weekly data, we built a comprehensive list of media reporters – especially reporters who covered the radio industry. And, we began sending the branded weekly Top 10 data to a wide list of reporters.

Not surprisingly, initially the reporters were skeptical. They’d never heard of the company or their technology. We answered questions, and sure some reporters said they weren’t interested at all and we stopped pitching them. At the outset, media coverage was slow. But we continued our strategy and sent the data every week.

The campaign worked. First, one publication published the Top 10 Internet Radio streams list, then a second publication, then a third, and so on. Then, after publishing the list for several months, one week we missed our regular release date for the data by several days, and we received multiple emails and phone calls asking where the data was.

In today’s never-ending media cycle, the media beast has to be fed. Reporters are looking for information. Reporters usually aren’t interested in rewriting a press release or publishing a story about the latest small feature upgrade. If you can provide a reporter with accurate, informative data related to your specific industry or vertical, many reporters will be interested.

However, I should mention, whenever possible stay as neutral as possible. Most companies aren’t going to issue data that directly contradicts their business model. But you shouldn’t pull together industry data and issue a press release or a report that says in effect, “According to our recent data, we have the solution to all your problems.” Take a neutral path, strive to be a resource for reporters by providing insightful data about your industry and vertical, and data-driven PR can lead to consistent media coverage for your company to augment your company and product PR efforts.

In late 2009, Wertz created a H.J. Heinz, yes the ketchup company, twitter account and proceeded to twitter on behalf of Heinz – links to recipes, bits of history about the company. He followed people in Pittsburgh, Heinz’s hometown, and people who included the word “Heinz” in their tweets, and he started to build a following.

And, oh yeah, he was never authorized by Heinz to create a Twitter account or to tweet on their behalf. After two weeks, Wertz logged into Twitter and found his account changed from @HJ_Heinz to @notHJ_Heinz. Today, if you’re curious and try to find the @HJ_Heinz account, they’ve protected their tweets. What?

Some might read my headline above and think it’s misleading. They were listening and they responded. “They contacted Twitter and had this yahoo booted after two weeks.” Two weeks? Time in social media is measured in dog years. Two weeks is the equivalent of about 6 months.

I’m curious. If Wertz had been tweeting links to unsanitary uses of ketchup, would Heinz have responded faster?

Yes, someone at Heinz was listening, despite their slow response. But, what if you’re working at a company that can’t afford a social media monitoring dashboard? What if you’re a small, locally-owned business that wants to make sure you know what people are saying about your business online, yet you don’t want to spend hours each day manually doing searches on Twitter to monitor the conversation.

Learning how to set up a real-time Twitter monitoring system isn’t new. Chris Brogan wrote about in January 2009, and you should definitely check out his article. But, technology changes, and I have some updates to Brogan’s great suggestions.

How to set up a real-time Twitter monitoring system:

1. Go to Twitter Search.

2. Search on your business name.

3. On the results page of your Twitter search, notice the orange RSS button in the upper right hand corner of the page with the text, “Feed for this query.” Click on that button.

4. Copy and paste the RSS feed URL, and then go to Feed My Inbox, and subscribe to that feed. For $5 per month, you can subscribe to 25 feeds and get real-time feed updates. If you choose that option, you will get an email, in real-time, each time your business name shows up in Twitter. If real-time updates overwhelm you, you can easily change them to once-a-day updates.

5. Go back to step 1, and create a new feed with the name of your town, the type of business you’re in, (Mexican restaurant, plumber) combined with another word, “hates, crap, love, wonderful, question, recommend” and you can create multiple feeds, each one of them subscribed to via Feed My Inbox.

6. As Chris Brogan pointed out, you can use this type of system in a variety of online monitoring tools, including Google Alerts, Icerocket (for monitoring blog conversations), etc.

Are you monitoring the Twitter conversation about your company and your local industry? Can you afford not to?

Photo credit – Nick Fraser

Jerry Rice, the famed wide receiver for the San Francisco 49ers, rarely took a day off in the offseason. He spent every offseason training – and training hard. Rice’s off-season workouts included two hours of cardiovascular running in the morning and three hours of strength training and weight lifting in the afternoon. His early-morning runs included a 5-mile uphill, vertical run. Then, at the summit, he’d throw in ten 40-meter uphill sprints.

You can take a look at the workout routines of other top athletes here.

How does your day-to-day work look in comparison to Rice and other stellar athletes?

If you’re working in digital marketing, PR, email marketing, SEO, paid search, what are you doing to train yourself to improve?

If you’re intent on being a world class marketer, a rock star, here are some things you could consider:

Time – are you punching a clock? Though you work in digital marketing, are you working bankers’ hours? I have two small kids, so I’m all about work-life balance. But, maybe you should consider setting aside a 1 or 2 week period in the next few weeks, work out logistics with your spouse/boyfriend/girlfriend, and work a series of 12-16 hours days for 1-2 weeks straight.

You can quickly do your “job” during those days, and then spend the other time throughout the day training and studying. If you’re in PR, what do your media lists and contact databases look like? Do you have a thorough list of the top bloggers covering your space. Have you emailed or tweeted them? Take your extra work time and start building those relationships.

Read – how many books did you read last year, last month, last week? And don’t just read Chris Brogan, David Meerman Scott, and Tamar Weinberg.

At the end of the day, most of us are in business. Sure, the tools have changed, but the basics of business haven’t changed all that much. Have you read Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap… and Others Don’t, The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life, Hug Your Customers: The Proven Way to Personalize Sales and Achieve Astounding Results, The Essential Drucker: The Best of Sixty Years of Peter Drucker’s Essential Writings on Management (Collins Business Essentials), and Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping–Updated and Revised for the Internet, the Global Consumer, and Beyond?

If you don’t think you have the time to read, first turn off the television, and then read this article by Julien Smith about how he read a book a week last year.

Analytics – sure, you’re intent on social media outreach, you’ve just finished a very successfull PR campaign for a client that resulted in a bunch of press coverage, your SEO is rocking and you’re killing your important keywords in Google’s SERPs. But, what is all that success doing for your bottom line? How many new leads have you generated.

Spend your extra-work week digging into the analytics of your site, and start getting answers to those questions. Read and study Avinash Kaushik.

Maybe you’ll discover that yes, you’re successfully driving traffic, but that traffic has terrible conversion. Analytics can give you answers to many of those questions, and you can begin testing new landing pages, conducting A/B testing, and figure out how to convert the traffic that is hitting your site every day.

Podcasts – You could spend some of your training time listening to podcasts. If you haven’t listened to Marketing Over Coffee yet, that should be your first stop. John and Chris’ podcast is filled with useful, actionable knowledge that you can start applying to your site and your marketing efforts immediately. And, there are plenty of other podcasts, that can educate and broaden your thinking about what you’re doing every day. 10 Golden Rules of Internet Marketing, Jaffe Juice, For Immediate Release, Six Pixels of Separation, are just a few to get you started.

So what’s your digital marketing training regime look like? Are you the next Jerry Rice in the making?

The first year, I spent the majority of my time focusing on traditional PR efforts – contacting local newspapers, radio, TV – for calendar listings, pre-event press coverage, and day-of press coverage. I also worked on traditional advertising/marketing – running print ads in local newspapers and weeklies.

We had a lot of success that first year. The festival has been a local institution for many years, so the local media is definitely interested in covering the event each year.

However, last year, I decided to ramp up our digital marketing efforts. Here’s what we’ve done so far:

Website – launched the Festival of the Hills website – with design/coding help from Erica Goleman. Now, I need to work on SEO for the site. I just noticed when I googled the phrase Festival of the Hills we’re 6th in Google’s organic search results. Yes, there are other Festivals around the U.S. named the Festival of the Hills, but I know we can rank higher than # 6.

Twitter – I started a Twitter account for the festival. I researched local Twitter users and started following them. But, honestly, I don’t think the Twitter account worked all that great. The problem I ran into was Twittering about a local event. What do you Twitter about? Ultimately, since this was a volunteer project after all and I didn’t have a ton of time to develop a full-fledged Twitter persona, I ended up Twittering basic even info reminders – with links to the website. Not great, but we did get some retweets out of it.

This year I’m considering live Tweeting throughout the day of the Festival, and again doing some Tweeting of event info prior to the event.

Flickr pool – As part of the website, we set up a Flickr pool for people to tag photos of the Festival that they uploaded to Flickr.

Event websites – I created event pages for the Festival on both Eventbrite and Eventful. My thinking was to create these event pages to help with SEO and to offer another place online that someone could discover the Festival. Also, I like Eventful’s weekly email newsletters. You can sign up to receive info on certain types of events in your local area – music concerts, arts, kids and family activities. As a parent, I’ve discovered a few kids activities vai Eventful’s weekly e-newsletters that I didn’t know about before.

I wish more events and people used Eventul. I like the concept of Eventful “pushing” info on events that they think I’ll be interested in. And, that beats having to subscribe to a million different e-newsletters from local concert venues, museums, etc. But, I still don’t think Eventful is as robust as it could be on capturing all the great local events in our area of Western Massachusetts.

As far as the impact for the Festival of the Hills, I’d say the impact of the event websites were negligible.

Craigslist – For the past 2 years, I’ve posted event info in the events section of Craigslist. Of all the online marketing we’ve done, we’ve gotten the most response from our Craigslist postings. People routinely email us as a result of the Craigslist postings asking specific questions about the Festival.

Calendar listings – I worked to make sure the Festival was listed on all the local media – newspaper, radio, TV – online events calendars. Again, does anyone read those? I don’t know, but I’ll continue posting on them next year.

Email – With the website launch, we included an email sign-up form. Thus far, the sign-ups have been minimal. This year, I’m going to work on actively collecting emails from Festival attendees. My plan is that email list would be extremely dormant. Maybe, we’d email once during the summer reminding people of the date of the Festival of the Hills and asking them to save the date. Then, maybe 4 weeks prior to the event, we’d send one email per week as a reminder/build up/count down to the Festival.

Facebook – Last year, I didn’t create a Facebook fan page for the Festival. But, it’s at the top of my To Do list for this year.

As I worked on these various digital marketing initiatives for the Festival, I remember looking around online for any insight into local event SEO. I did find this blog post about local event SEO from Katz Web Services which I found helpful.

What do you think? Did I miss something obvious? Where do you think I should spend my time online this year in marketing the Festival? Right now, I’m thinking that I’m going to spend a good chunk of time on the Facebook fan page. With the viral – easy sharing – via Facebook, it seems like a no-brainer to me.

However, when Linchpin launched, I did notice something and wanted to mention it, because once I noticed it, I started asking myself questions.

When the book launched, for several days, everywhere I turned in social media, I saw a review or someone mentioning the book.

Here’s only a few reviews/mentions of Linchpin:

Marketing Over Coffee podcast interview with Seth – January 25th

David Meerman Scott interview with Seth Godin re: Linchpin – January 25th

Duct tape Marketing podcast interview with Seth Godin – January 26th

Gretchen Rubin’s Happiness Project blog interview with Seth Godin – January 26th

During that 4-5 day window in late January, I couldn’t open up Google Reader without seeing Seth Godin’s smiling face – and yet another interview with him about Linchpin.

But, after that overwhelming barrage of interviews, Godin and Linchpin fell off the proverbial cliff in terms of digital publicity. Most writers lie awake at night dreaming of that many interviews touting their words and wisdom. But, was is it too much all at one time?

Again, to state the obvious, Seth is a very smart marketer, and he knows what he’s doing. He doesn’t need me to tell him how to sell books.

Right now, as I write this blog post on February 16, 2010, here’s Linchpin’s current Amazon rankings:

#50 in Books
#1 in Books > Business & Investing > Job Hunting & Careers > Guides
#2 in Books > Business & Investing > Business Life
#4 in Books > Reference

But, I still do wonder – what if he had staggered those interviews? Sure, you could do a big initial splash, but save your ammunition so to speak and do 3-5 interviews with influential bloggers every week for 6-8 weeks straight.

Would that staggered book publicity have an impact? What do you think?

Now, I’m off to read Linchpin and see what everyone is raving about.

Recently, Ian Lewis, read some of my blog posts about eBooks and emailed me a few questions. After several back-and-forth emails, I thought it’d be of interest to publish this email conversation as a blog post.

On Feb 12, 2010, at 5:41 PM, Ian Lewis wrote:

Jeff,

i’ve been reading a couple of your articles recently, including this one below. All very informative.

http://jeffrutherford.com/ebook-pricing-may-force-an-ebook-napster-soon

“Amazon is taking a loss on just about every hardcover title they sell on the Kindle for $9.99.”

so you are saying the publishers are forcing Amazon to charge too much for e-books, and therefore they aren’t selling as well? why is Amazon losing money?

if i was to write a book, and publish through Amazon via an e-book, and bypass the publisher, is that the ‘new model’ for new authors? or is it unlikely to sell due to zero marketing?

best wishes,

ian

Hi Ian,

Actually, I think I should clarify that post. Until the last two weeks, when Amazon got into a heated debate with Macmillan, and eventually gave into MacMillan’s pricing demands, here’s what was happening.

Amazon was buying eBooks from publishers at a wholesale price similar to a physical book. So Amazon was actually paying $13-16 per ebook, and yes, Amazon was losing money on every single eBook that they sold for $9.99. They could afford to do this, because Amazon has a lot of money in the bank. And, they were doing that, because they wanted to create a market for eBooks, and I think came up with a reasonable price point of $9.99.

However, book publishers HATED that $9.99 price because they thought it devalued the price of a book. As a result, publishers started threatening to not release ebook versions of new hardbacks until 4-6 months after the hardback was released – to keep Amazon from selling brand new books for $9.99.

But, now Amazon is in intense negotiations with a bunch of different publishers who want to raise that $9.99 price, and Amazon has basically had to give in to them.

Frankly, I think publishers are making a big mistake. Publishers are trying to say that consumers should pay the same for a digital file as a printed book. I don’t think most consumers think that way. Why should I pay $14-20 for a digital file that cost pennies to distribute.

Here’s a long comment that I recently wrote in response to a story about this whole issue on the All Things Digital blog.

http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/20100209/book-publishers-beware-at-itunes-expensive-music-equals-slower-sales/

Book publishers are focused on setting an artificial price. A price that has no relation to the actual cost of distributing a digital file, but has everything to do with setting a price somewhat close to a typical trade paperback. Hmm, why should I pay the same price for downloading a relatively small digital file vs. the price covering your cost of printing, binding, shipping a book to a retailer or distributor, then, oh yeah, paying the cost of those retailers to return unsold copies.

I wrote about this in a recent blog post. I think book publishers are inviting an eBook Napster –
http://jeffrutherford.com/ebook-pricing-may-force-an-ebook-napster-soon

Finally, to answer your question about a new model for writers. Yes, I definitely think that e-publishing will be an option for writers – both writers who have had books published by traditional publishers, and writers who have never had a book published. In fact, Stephen Covey, the author of 7 Habits Of Highly Successful People recently signed a deal with Amazon to publish many of his popular books for the Kindle – and new ebooks too. In that case, Covey will get 70% of whatever Amazon charges, and Amazon will get 30%. That’s a much higher royalty rate than he’d get from a traditional publisher.

But, for the unpublished writer who decides to go down that route, you asked a very good question. What about PR and publicity. There are literally hundreds of novels being uploaded to the Kindle story every day – by previously unpublished writers. How can you stand out in that? I don’t have a good answer to that. You would have to have some kind of PR-buzz, or your book will just get lost in the ebook forest.

And, I keep using the word Kindle. There’s a company called Smashwords that will take your book and publish it electronically on multiple ebook platforms – Barnes & Noble, Sony, etc. So, it’s not just Kindle.

Also, re: the whole issue of writers who have had books published, and then making money off of ebooks sales of their old titles, you should definitely check out this blog. It’s written by JA Konrath, a crime writer who has had multiple novels published. But, he had a bunch of manuscripts of books that he had tried to sell with no success – before he sold his first novel. Now, he’s published all those old manuscripts via the Kindle Store, and he’s making money.

http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/2009/10/kindle-numbers-traditional-publishing.html

Bezos never misses an opportunity to tout how Amazon’s every move is done to make their customers happy. At the same time, Amazon has repeatedly talked about how the Amazon Kindle is one of the most gifted items ever.

If that’s the case, why would Amazon ship Kindles in a box emblazoned with the word Amazon Kindle? If you know that the device is being given as a gift, don’t you know that in most modern American families, there are lots of different people checking the mail every day?

On Christmas Eve, I went to our local post office to pick up our mail, and there was an Amazon Kindle box in our stack of letters and packages. I didn’t order an Amazon Kindle for my wife. So that left only one other option, my wife’s present for me had arrived on Christmas Eve . . . but the surprise was ruined.

Shipping Kindles in clearly marked boxes is not very customer friendly. I enjoy the surprise of opening gift-wrapped presents on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. That surprise was ruined for me this year.

I’m definitely enjoying the Kindle, and I’m certainly not disparaging my wife’s thoughtful gift. I just wish Jeff Bezos hadn’t ruined my Christmas surprise.

First, let’s recap the recent ebook and book publishing headlines:

• Barnes & Noble’s nook launches. The first wave of nook reviews were great, the second wave of reviews not so great – I doubt David Pogue at the New York Times or Walt Mossberg from the Wall Street Journal will be giving many nooks for holiday presents.

• Simon and Schuster and Hachette Book Group, quickly followed by HarperCollins, announced that they would delay the release of eBooks until 3-4 months after the hardback has been released.

• Stephen Covey signs an exclusive ebook deal with Amazon.com to publish both new books and several of his bestselling backlist titles exclusively via the Amazon Kindle. Several of the news articles reported Covey would be receiving a royalty rate north of 50% from Amazon.

As you probably know, publishers are upset that Amazon is selling Kindle version of brand-new hardback books for $9.99. Hence, Simon and Schuster, Hachette, and HarperCollins’ moves to delay the release of ebook versions of their new releases.

Wow, James McQuivey, Ph.D., (@jmcquivey) Forrester Research analyst, said it best in response to Simon & Schuster and Hachette Book Group’s decision – “This move is about the past of your business.”

Why are publishers having such a difficult time in realizing that their industry has undergone a seismic shift since the launch of the Amazon Kindle?

I understand it’s painful to realize that the cost structure on which you’ve operated your business has changed overnight. But, it has. It simply has. You can deny it. You can say that 9.99 is predatory pricing. You can wail. You can scream. You can gripe. You can stick your head in the sand.

But reality is reality. You cannot put the ebook genie back in the bottle (even by windowing your eBook release by 3-4 months) no matter how much you try.

The first mention of Napster that I could find in the New York Times was on January 20, 2000. Book publishers have had 9 years to prepare for an eBook Napster. But they haven’t. Instead, they’re sticking their fingers in their ears and hoping to somehow convince me that I should pay $25 for an electronic file that costs pennies to distribute.

I mentioned earlier that the release of the Amazon Kindle ushered in this seismic shift in the eBook industry. That’s not because I’m a Kindle fanboy. It’s simply because Kindle debuted with the marketing muscle of Amazon.com, the leading ecommerce company in the U.S., and constantly in the top 10 most-visited websites in the U.S.. Amazon.com could post a bowl of spoiled butter on their homepage, day after day, and they’d sell bucketloads. With the constant Kindle marketing on the homepage and banner ads on interior product pages, the number of affluent customers, passionate book readers, and Amazon’s slick marketing videos of Neil Gaiman, Toni Morrison, and other prominent authors singing the praises of the Kindle, it’s inevitable that Amazon would have a hit on its hands. And, of course, wireless. Sony was the first to market with a credible eBook reader, but they relied on a clunky web-based store, and no wireless, and now they’re a second-run.

In the era of compact discs, the music business clung to the concept of the full-length album. With many genres of music (country, rap, heavy metal, etc.), an artist may only have 1 or 2 quality songs, and the rest of the album would be complete filler. Yet, record companies would price CD singles at $3,4,5, 6 or more, thinking that if they added a couple of remix versions of an artist’s hit song, then it would somehow justify charging a higher price than 1 or 2 bucks.

Now, consumers can easily access and buy music the way that they want to, and the music industry has undergone complete turmoil and reinvention – full-length album sales are down, terrestrial radio is on life support, satellite radio and Internet-based radio such as Pandora, is growing, bands try to make their money with live performances and Tshirts/product sales. But, at the end of the day, people are still listening to and enjoy music just as much as ever. People still go to concerts and performances and sing along, off-key, in their car. But, yes, the underlying economics of the music industry has fundamentally changed.

The same is true for book publishers. The digital/ebooks genie is out the bottle. Do I think that all books should be free? Absolutely not. Do I think that publishers should close their doors and we’ll all have to sift through waves of self-published books searching for quality books? No, I don’t think that’s the case either.

But, I do know that you can’t expect to convince, cajole, or market to consumers that $25 is a reasonable price to pay for a digital file that takes pennies to distribute electronically. If you insist on that price point, you will guarantee a Napster for eBooks. Almost all of the major eBook devices can now read PDF files. What’s to stop someone from scanning that NY Times bestseller that isn’t currently available in eBook format and distributing it via torrents, email, social media, etc.? And, keep in mind, scanners and scanning technology are improving every year. Scanning a 500-page book gets easier every year.

What will publishing look like if consumers continue to demand a $10 price point for new books?

Much lower advances - or no advances. We’re in 2010 in a couple of weeks, there’s no reason that book publishers can’t pay royalties for ebook sales once per month, and pay royalties for traditional book sales on a monthly basis too – with a reserve against returns, of course.

Much lower print runs – and more print on demand – if eBook sales continue, bound book sales will decline.

Out-sourced editorial – publishers will run on an even more barebones staff with editorial and artwork outsourced on a project-by-project basis.

I would like to think that book publishers could be nimble and react to the seismic industry changes wrought by eBook sales. Yet, I think that by the very nature of large organizations, it’s difficult for them to realize titanic shifts, throw out rulebooks and rethink their businesses from the ground up.

AOL is hard at work building a next generation online content company. But, that content is going to be driven not by the traditional editorial meeting where a bunch of people try to discern the zeitgeist of the day and write stories based on their gut feel for what people are interested in. No. AOL is going to make the large majority of its editorial decisions on what to write about and what to cover based on powerful search data. What are people already looking for online? AOL’s writers and editors will then crank out content to satisfy the interest of those searchers and readers – and obviously sell a boatload of ads in the process.

I think Farhad’s mistake is in assuming that AOL is going to slavishly follow the business model of Associated Content – another company that generates content on demand. And, as Farhad painfully details, Associated Content churns out awful content that does nothing but clutter up the Web with useless words sloppily cobbled together to quickly game the search engines.

But, what if AOL decides to go in a different direction?

What if AOL uses the Associated Content model – content driven by what people are expressly interested in and searching for – but create high-quality content that fulfills a genuine need – informing and expanding on subjects that people are genuinely interested in. This is not a new business model by any means – About.com comes immediately to mind. Instead of focusing on short tail, timely topics, About.com guides for years have been writing about long-tail, niche topics. And, in many cases, About.com can provide some good, rich content. Two more recent companies have tried a similar model of providing and curating long-tail content – Jason Calacanis’ Mahalo and Seth Godin’s Squidoo.

As Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land has written about on more than one occasion, the rich content of the web can often show alarming gaps when there’s a breaking news story and people start searching for information on a topic that is trending. Sullivan has used the example of Southern California wildfires. During wildfire season, if you do a search for “california fires maps” you end up getting a wild variety of content, including outdated Los Angeles Times fire maps from previous years. Sullivan has written about the concept of living URLs to combat this issue. For example, a Los Angles Times living URL for “california wild fires” would lead to the Los Angeles Times’ latest news about wild fires in chronological order – freshest content at the top of course. Google just announced a new Living Stories experiment with the New York Times and the Washington Post along these lines.

What does living urls have to do with AOL’s new content strategy? Basically, that Aol. could be on the verge of a very interesting and potentially profitable business model as long as they emphasize quality content.

AOL content SWAT team

Around the clock, AOL identifies gaps between what content people are searching for online and what content currently exists. If there’s a gap that could be filled, Aol. throws a team of editors/writers at the problem and creates content – quality content – to fulfill that need.

There’s one thing AOL could do to make this business model even more powerful – create an AOL “cold case” team to compliment the work of their content SWAT team. In addition to the team of editors/writers hard at work creating content for the short tail searches, the AOL cold case team would routinely go back through the AOL content that’s already been created, add to it, strengthen it with more original reporting, and do everything they can to enrich the content. That way, AOL can still have high-ranking quality content when those short tail searches become long tail searches.

Maclaren, a British high-end stroller company, currently faces a recall of 1 million umbrella strollers because the stroller’s folding hinge can amputate a child’s fingertips. According to reports, 12 children have already been injured.

Unfortunately, Maclaren fumbled their response to the recall. Here are a few things that Maclaren could have done differently.

1. Your website MUST work – We’re living in a digital world. When a PR storm hits your company, your customers aren’t going to call your 1-800 number. They’re going to hit your site to find out what’s going on. According to Time magazine’s story about Maclaren’s crisis, on Monday their website was basically inaccessible.

If you’re in charge of your company’s PR crisis plan, anticipate sudden, huge bursts of web traffic. If you wake up tomorrow with the FTC issuing a recall on one of your products, do you know exactly who you can call at your company who can immediately make the call to increase bandwidth and server capacity to handle the onslaught to your company’s website? If not, you need to think about this now – not when the storm hits.

Also, today, if you visited the Maclaren website, you’d be hard pressed to immediately find any information about the recall. There’s a link for recall in the top right-hand navigation menu of the page. The word “recall” is the same size font and color as the rest of the nav menu words. Why not have a prominent button that no one would miss – Maclaren Stroller Recall – We Want to Keep Your Child’s Fingers Safe – Please Click Here for Detailed Info

2. Twitter – It doesn’t really matter if you’re an active participant, just listening, or think that people on Twitter only talk about what they’re having for lunch. When a crisis hits, your customers, your critics, your evangelists, will be discussing your crisis on Twitter. And so should you. Certainly, you can also use traditional PR crisis tactics – press conferences, conference calls with reporters, 1-on-1 briefings with key reporters, but you should also be using Twitter aggressively to combat and negate the storm.

Maclaren execs could have first issued pro-active messages about the recall via Twitter – including a link to a webpage with all the info about the recall. Then, they could start engaging 1-on-1 with anyone mentioning or discussing the recall. If someone turns to Twitter to ask about a company’s recall, and then immediately gets a response directly from the company, that’s a whole lot better than an echo chamber of customers discussing, griping, complaining about a company’s recall with nary a tweet or word directly from the company.

3. Engage Your Critics ProActively – Moms and Dads these days are blogging about the trials and tribulations of parenthood. The Time article pointed out that many parenting bloggers were vocal in their consternation at the recall and Maclaren’s fumbled response. Here’s where the all-nighter comes in. In addition to an around-the-clock, proactive Twitter outreach strategy, Maclaren should have been engaging bloggers. First, they could have scoured the blogosphere for any mention of the recall and responded in the comments of the blog explaining the recall and what parents could do to order the stroller widget that fixes the hinge danger. But, Maclaren could have gone beyond responding via comments. They could have drafted a quick “blog response” to the crisis – an expansion of the blog comment text – and offered/suggested that bloggers run the item as a guest post. Would some bloggers have refused? Certainly. But some would have published it.

4. Facebook – Maclaren was right on in their Facebook strategy. Again, according to Time magazine, “An entry on the “Maclaren Baby” page instructs consumers to e-mail sales@maclarenbaby.com with their name, address, telephone number, stroller model and stroller Vin number.” This is good, proactive communication via social media. However, I wonder if Maclaren used the feature available to any Facebook page , “Send an Update to Fans.” If they didn’t, they should have. A simple update on a Facebook page can easily get lost in the stream of Facebook news. An update gives the message a little more Facebook urgency and attention.

Here’s the link to Maclaren’s website re: the recall:

http://recall.maclarenbaby.com/

What else could Maclaren done to get their message out yesterday when the FTC announced the recall?

Photo – bbaunch, some rights reserved

It seems so elementary now. But I was there when all of our interactions with foreign publishers and foreign agents was done via faxes. Hard-to-read faxes. Email made that part of my job so much easier.

Since then, I’ve spent a long time in PR working with digital companies – large and small. I use the Web for 10 hours per day – or more.

But, we still have such a long way to go . . .

Tomorrow, my wife has an all-day seminar in Boston she’s attending, so I’m going to be walking around the city, and exploring the aquarium with my two young sons. I wanted to do some QUICK and EASY online research to find out some basic info about downtown Boston. I wanted to see how I could walk from the Government Center T stop to the New England aquarium. Here’s the walking directions from the aquarium’s website:

If you are already in the Faneuil Hall/Quincy Market area, the North End, Government Center or the Financial District, the Aquarium is just a short walk away.

That’s great, but I’ve probably spent 4 hours of my life in and around Faneuil Hall and the North End. How about some basic directions to go with that. “If you’re walking from Faneuil Hall, here’s the route to take . . .”

I started writing this blog post, and I immediately thought, some commenter is going to come along and say, “Why didn’t you just Google directions.”

So, I did. I Googled, “how to walk from faneuil hall to new england aquarium.” This is the result I got:

I’m not a search engineer. But, why can’t I spend 30 seconds searching for walking directions from Faneuil Hall to the New England Aquarium, and get a nice street-by-street route w/ accompanying map?

I eventually printed out a Google map of the Faneuil Hall-North End area. If you’re in downtown Boston tomorrow, and see me walking around lost, how about giving me a ride or some decent directions.

The nights are getting colder. The leaves are falling. And more importantly, football season is in full swing again. (Let’s just hope the New York Jets, my team, can recover from their last two ugly losses).

What can PR consultants and PR agencies learn from football?

Strategic – if you’re a spray and pray PR firm, sending out tons of non-targeted emails, or sending the junior staff and interns running for the phones when a client is angry, you’re not going to be very successful. Sure, you may complete a few “passes,” and get an article written about your client every now and then. But, for the most part, you’re not going to succeed.

The same in football. If you walk out onto the field without a solid game plan, and your quarterback is just throwing the ball downfield, hoping that someone will catch it, you’re not going to win many football games.

Preparation – Research, plan, and prepare. It’s the same for football as it is with public relations.

When the Indianapolis Colts faced the Chicago Bears in the Super Bowl, Peyton Manning watched every single Bears play for every game throughout the season – studying the small defense’s small details. When he hit the field, he knew exactly what to expect.

It’s been said a thousand – no, a million – times. Do your research before you pitch a reporter. Manning watched every single play for an entire season. How many articles do you read before you pick up the phone and call a reporter? One or two? How about six months worth of articles?

You should know exactly the types of stories a reporter routinely writes. If you read enough of a reporter’s stories, you’ll see obvious trends, interests, and you can probably figure out what the reporter is not writing.

Grind it out – It’s important to think about your client’s messaging, positioning, and branding. But, at the end of the day, PR doesn’t happen unless you pick up the phone or write a well-crafted email. Ultimately, good PR campaigns are won in the trenches – not giving up on a story, and making sure you pitch everyone who could possibly be interested in the story you’re telling.

The same can be said of football. Sure, you have explosive offenses that can score within 5 or 6 plays. But, many smart coaches know that one very successful key to winning games is in the trenches. Grind out long scoring drives on the ground to control the clock.

Have you done the hard work and preparation needed? Are you ready to pitch a story and succeed? Are you ready to hit the field and win?

Photo credit – Athens Banner-Herald (Online Athens)

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