Eric Schwartzman

If you’re a PR professional, you can’t afford not to listen to On the Record…Online. For the past three years, this podcast has offered a steady stream insight on how journalists, marketers and new media innovators use the Internet to report the news and promote their businesses. Host Eric Schwartzman has anchored all 120 programs and in the process become a media influencer in his own right.

Paul came across On the Record…Online when he was writing The New Influencers and devoured program after program. He later devoted a couple of pages of the book to describing how the show had evolved from a conference promotion to become a staple of Schwartzman’s iPressroom service.

In this interview, Schwartzman talks about how On the Record…Online came into being, the impact it’s had on his business and how public relations is evolving in a world of fragmented media.

Download the podcast (27:39)

Does print still have value? The people at Neighborsgo.com would argue that it does. This website, which is a spinoff ofthe Dallas Morning News, is using a social network to anchor a community journalism initiative. Local residents create profiles and post information about their interests.

Every week, editors dig through comments from citizens and produce 18 local print editions. Here’s a description of how it works. The opportunity to be featured in print is a major impetus for local residents to contribute, says managing editor Oscar Martínez (left). And it may actually be a jump start for careers. One journalism student has used her trip to Beijing to contribute a series of articles on the preparations for the Olympics. The visibility she’s received has been worth more than any internship could offer.

Martínez is a career newspaper guy who made the switch to online media eight years ago. He understands the difficulties that print journalists are experiencing in moving to a new medium. In this audio interview, he talks about the innovations that are working for Neighborsgo and how journalists can find their distinct value in a new world of consumer-generated media.

To play the interview, click here. To download, right-click the link and save to a local file (49:53)

That is one big bunny!

As EF Schumacher once wrote, “Small is beautiful.” This week, David is a dinner guest at Chez Gillin in Framingham. We use the f2f opp to interview his lovely wife Dana about her own bunny-related podcasts and related Web properties. We talk about the importance of smaller, more focused markets, which is ironic given the level of alcohol consumption made us anything but focused. The moral of this podcast is to find your passion, develop that passion into a niche and dominate it completely with your various Web-related efforts. (We apologize about the poor sound quality, and promise to do better with future podcasts.) Paul’s jeer is about the frequent rescheduled appointments from PR people and how much time is wasted therein. David has a cheer for Jeanette Maher, IBM’s PR doyenne, and hope we can reconnect with her soon.

You can download the podcast here.

Chris Brogan is all about social media. The engineer-turned-marketer has one of the largest Twitter followings, is an active blogger and co-founded the Podcamp series of unconferences, which have been held in more than 40 countries. He currently crafts the content for CrossTech Media’s growing conference series, but he mainly publishes in media of all kinds.

Brogan is a prolific communicator. In addition to his frequently updated blog, he is active in multiple social networks and can usually be counted upon to respond to a Twitter request within a few minutes. His blog posts are full of practical and insightful advice for marketers. In this interview, Chris explains the addictive appeal of Twitter, describes the new conference model that is emerging from social media and updates us on some of his recent promotional projects that leverage online groups and video in innovative ways.

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Paul’s been on the road, and he recently took a tour of the pressroom at the Los Angeles Times, a newspaper that’s been awash in controversy. Tribune Co. owner Sam Zell has made it clear that he intends to measure journalists increasingly by the volume of their output. David and Paul think this is a bad idea, although they do acknowledge that journalism is still too opaque a profession to the casual outsider. Journalists need to be more transparent.

Paul just returned from the Enterprise 2.0 conference, where corporate interest in social networks was evident. He thinks big businesses are going to glom on to these tools with enthusiasm. If the CIA can do it, anyone can.

David has a jeer for PR pros who use editorial calendars to pitch executives instead of ideas. Paul remarks on the practice of posting huge PDF files on websites as a barrier to sharing meaningful information. They agree that the best kind of pitch is one that saves the reporter time and trouble. Unfortunately, agencies and their clients are still too focused on pushing executives and messages instead of valuable ideas.

Don’t forget to stick around at the end for Dana’s Pick of the Pod!

Download the podcast (17:24)

Following a long series of shows featuring interviews with everyong from CEOs to anonymous bloggers, David and Paul reflect on what they’ve learned from these interactions. Paul is impressed by the fact that people who were once hard to reach have now become so accessible.

David is annoyed by the slow adoption rate of collaboration tools and wonders why people fall back to e-mail when such significant productivity improvements are available. Paul thinks productivity isn’t enough. People tend to fall back to the tools they’ve used for a long time, even if they don’t do a very good job.

In Cheers & Jeers, David tells of an interview he has coming up with someone, but he doesn’t know who. The PR person won’t tell him. Paul says he’s now receiving pitches aimed at bloggers, but they look suspiciously like the mass mailings he used to get when he was an editor.

Be sure to listen for bonus features, including Dana’s Pick of the Pod and some amusing outtakes.

Download the podcast (right-click and save): 19:48

You wouldn’t think that a blog that talks about Eva Peron, cervical cancer, and how to get pregnant would have a wide appeal, but these and are topics can be quite compelling. This week we have a mystery guest on the show, Dr. P, a working gynecologist who writes The Blog that Ate Manhattan. She talks about what is like to find her voice and thrive in another profession, how and whom she blogs for, and the kinds of topics that she covers on her blog. Here is one sample of her rather delicious writing style to whet your appetite, as it were, in a post telling women how to get pregnant:

Procreation is like Windows Explorer – it’s built into the operating system. (Weren’t you starting to wonder if Bill Gates was God?) The default mode is pregnant. And here’s the thing - you’ve been using the pop-up blocker! So turn it off already … and let nature take its course.

You can download and listen to the episode here.

I asked ten highly experienced technology journalists their experience with using email and RSS notifications of press releases, and got some surprising results. Now granted this is a very selected group, and completely unscientific. But still.

One finding is that only two out of the ten respondents subscribe to RSS feeds of the companies that they cover. “The PR people are pretty good about harassing, I mean informing me of their press releases,” said Theresa Carey. And while Vaughan-Nicols uses Bloglines to track his RSS feeds, it is mostly to track the various open source community feeds rather than press releases from vendors.

Dan Dern has some suggestions for PR people posting press releases on their Web sites and recommends that each release contain the following information:

1. Not having a fixed URL for each new press release
2. Not date-tagging releases on the summary page (Epson for example omits these)
3. Making subcategories a pull-down list, requiring extra clicks
4. Missing or not easily apparent PR contact information
5. Having releases in Acrobat, but not (also) HTML

He recommends the expemplary HP and Xerox press pages, and mentions Brother as a counter example.

Four out of the ten respondents explicity opt-in to email mailing lists to get notifications of news releases. But they aren’t always easy to find on corporate Web sites: “Sometimes I had to go to extra lengths to find them to get onto them,” says Dern. Rarely do these mailings result in ink, however. One reporter estimated that “fewer than one in a thousand press releases I get are on-target at all. The rest are a waste of my time.” But when a PR person actually knows the beat covered by the reporter, the odds go up astronomically that a release will generate a story: “It helps when a flack that really knows my beat and I have worked with them before.”

Another surprising finding is that PR people still don’t use BCC fields in email blasts, and copy everyone in their emails to the tune of a few a week with some journalists. While the practice is in decline, it still happens “way too often, and from major vendors, too,” said Jason Perlow. You can tell a lot from the names that are copied on the list, says Esther Schindler: “If I see a long-out-of-date e-mail ID on the list, it’s a clue that the PR person isn’t tuned in anymore. If the list is relatively short (say 20 or fewer journalists), it tells me which publications the PR person thinks are important for this release (and implies that we’re their short list). If it’s longer, though, it usually becomes an auto-delete.”

Clearly, we have a long way to go in our industry before the technologies that we actually write about – like RSS feeds — have become common practice for both journalists and PR professionals. And maybe by then we will totally eradicate the “copy to everyone” emails that still haunt our inboxes.

This week we have the privilege of speaking to Pat McGovern, chairman of International Data Group and the world’s most successful technology media executive. McGovern today oversees a $3 billion global media empire that spans more 90 countries and reaches more than 220 million people.

Amidst the constant churn in the information technology market, IDG has patiently grown and adapted through a philosophy of diversification, reader service and global expansion. In this interview, McGovern discusses:

• How the economics of electronic media make it a better business model than print;
• How Scandinavia and Asia are the leading the way in Internet innovation;
• How IDG’s experience with taking a business unit public convinced him of the value of keeping the company private;
• IDG’s new “Internet-first” strategy;
• How investments in Chinese entrepreneurs has transformed IDG’s business.

Pat McGovern’s success demonstrates the power of staying focused, adapting to change, experimenting and sticking with a long-term vision.

Download the podcast (25:44)

This week we talk to Melanie Seasons, a young PR blogger for Manning, Selvage and Lee Digital out of Ann Arbor. She writes the Fake Plastic Noodles blog and talks to David and Paul about how she works with her traditional PR media colleagues. Her job is to get them to understand the value of new media, and how to incorporate blogs and microsites and other digital techniques into traditional media campaigns.

“Digital PR is common sense, and it isn’t losing control of the message,” she says. She talks about how to approach, pitch, and recruit bloggers by building relationships with her PR team.

Download the podcast here.