In fact, Car used to have a wonderful columnist named George Bishop (who is sadly now in the great beyond) who would fill his column with the intimate behind the scenes details of the lavish car launch junkets manufacturers would throw for journalists – often involving trips to exotic locales, free lodging and meals, and copious behind the wheel boozing. All the other journalists were taking part in the fun too, it’s just that Bishop saw fit to weave the freebies into his articles.

While these events have been toned-down considerably for the auto industry some version of these launch junkets still exist in other industries and free samples or products are a matter of course for any company seeking to see their product in print.

It’s interesting then that the FTC has decided to clamp down on bloggers who review products for money in a way that seems to be more onerous than the standard that journalists are held to.

Make no mistake, the meat of the ruling  codifies the best practices I tell our clients about every day: transparency and authenticity. Paying bloggers for coverage should always merit disclosure.

Where it gets a bit tricky is what exactly constitutes payment. While Spin magazine writers get free CDs in order to write reviews, they are under no expectation to disclose this in every article. Yet, under the FTC regs it appears that bloggers who do the same could be seen as receiving an in-kind payment and be liable for an $11,000 fine.

While I applaud the FTC for rightfully cracking down on the practice of blogger payola, the wiggle room in the rules actually reinforces a divide between mainstream journalism and blogging that is becoming more arbitrary with each passing day.

While this will have little effect on the social media campaigns we  run for our clients, it fosters confusion as to the role bloggers can play in promoting brands and products. Are they paid shills, journalists without advertising dollars, adversaries, allies? We get asked all of these questions.

They can be any of these things but in my experience as both a blogger and a marketer the most valuable blogs for most brands appreciate being treated  with the same care and deference that any top media outlet or journalist would be treated with. That means a personal touch, no spam, a recognition of what they prefer to cover and write about and who their audience is.

It’s a shame the FTC didn’t take the same approach in writing their new rules.

Now there are the stirrings of what might turn out to be another popular revolution inside Iran and newsjunkies have skipped a whole generation ahead, past the 24-hour news channels which mostly filled their weekend schedules with less-expensive canned programming, and have gone straight to Twitter and the Huffington Post.

The Huffington Post’s continuously updated coverage is particularly noteworthy as the knock against the site from mainstream media purveyors like the New York Times is that they are unable to do original reporting. Yet Nico Pitney’s constantly updated feed has consistently trumped the Times Lede blog in consistency, insight and timeliness.

As for Twitter, it’s role as the premier purveyor of breaking news was already clear during the Mumbai attacks in India and the plane crash landing on the Hudson river, both last year. What’s changed this time is that Iran’s repressive regime was able to jam cellphones, text messaging, blogs, social networking sites and BBC Persia but have been unable to block messages from being sent out on Twitter. This has been aided and abetted by sympathizers who have used the micro-blogging service to guide folks in Iran to safe Internet ports free of government interference.

Twitter has become  a tool not only for getting word out to the rest of the world about what’s happening (as in Mumbai) but also to shape events by facilitating protests and communications both within and outside of Iran. In other words, it didn’t just reflect the news, it created it. It’s notable that when Iranian security forces have raided dorms and other resistance sites, they have made a point of smashing computers.

This is a vastly different model than what traditional news services have done or perhaps even want to do, but the ongoing success of both the Huffington Post and Twitter over the last few days serves as a lesson of how mainstream media has failed to adapt. There is still a role for mainstream media to play – Twitter users were not content to get their updates online, a new thread was started called #cnnfail to express disappointment in the lack of coverage from the news net 9though they could have targeted any of the major mainstream outlets.)

This is especially striking at a time when folks like Rupert Murdoch and others in the news biz are talking about retreating behind a paid subscription wall. Murdoch has been able to do this fairly successfully with his recently acquired crown jewel The Wall Street Journal in part because many of those paid subscriptions are sponsored by employers. Will the financial firms still standing spring for the New York Times? I highly doubt it.

What the New York Times (and other papers and media outlets) still have are trusted brand names and a significant amount of traffic that they haven’t figured out how to properly monetize. In this they are really in the same boat as Twitter and the Huffington Post.

Where the two upstarts beat them is in engagement – getting folks to spend time and build a relationship with the site. The Huffington Post in particular offers a model that the much more prestigious Times might want to embrace instead of disparage. Aggregated news, citizen journalists, and traditional reportage all curated with that distinct New York Times quality seal.

The Times, to its credit, already does some of this, including linking out to blogs and other sites. Yet its social media TimesPeople area limits article sharing from other sites, something that would probably increase user interaction substantially.

If the Times and other news organizations were to let go and embrace the new news paradigm that Twitter and Huffington Post embody, they could begin to monetize in ways that may not have made sense beforehand. Imagine a Times-branded news search engine with keyword based ads. Revolution is coming, it’s time to embrace it or get out of the way.

Questions or comments? Feel free to leave them here or check out Reprise Media folks on Twitter.

So it’s striking to see Larry King’s blog, on the CNN website, outright steal other people’s content (including a SearchViews post), with no attribution whatsoever. Simply linking the “Read More” button to the original post does not count. For anyone contemplating a corporate blog or otherwise, it’s important to be mindful of the basic rules of the road online. That includes the very big no-no of publishing someone else’s words without attribution. That’s called plagiarism. You would think that a blog on the website of a major news outlet like CNN would know better.

Now it’s perfectly fine to talk about something and embed a link to someone else’s article while doing so in your own language. However it’s our policy, in keeping with commonly accepted online and offline standards, to always attribute someone else’s words or thoughts as well as to link to them whenever possible.

Larry King’s blog on the other hand, seems to consist entirely of other’s words and thoughts, sometimes lightly edited or abridged, with no attribution and the previously mentioned  “Read More” button which does lead to the original source. Even if CNN views this as a placeholder blog (it’s one of the only parts of their site that isn’t discoverable by search engines) there is no excuse for making the content look like it’s coming from Larry King when it’s not.

What’s even more perplexing is that I wrote a comment on Larry’s blog, asking politely that we be given attribution. While several comments that have nothing to do with the stolen content but which are time stamped after mine  have been approved, my comment continues to be unpublished days after submission.

My friend, author and journalist Maria Raha, called this incident a symptom of “Generation Re-Blog” (notice the attribution, Larry) and she may well be on to something here. It’s all too easy in the age of Tumblr and re-tweeting to be cavalier about other people’s content.

The irony is that sharing (rather than stealing) content is one of the great joys of the Internet, whether it be a link from a blog, a mention on Twitter, or a full on quote on a message board. Linking benefits everyone by increasing the SEO power of a page (something Larry King’s blog is set up to block) in addition to allowing people to discover content they may otherwise never have seen.

I also think some of the blatant thievery may simply be coming from a place of general ignorance about how things are done in the online world.  After all, it was only in 2006 that Larry King defended his avoidance of the Internet (to Roseanne Barr) thusly: “But there’s 80 billion things on it.” Larry went on to say,” The wife loves it. I wouldn’t love it. What do you punch little buttons and things?…no thanks.” Considering that the time from 2006 to now must be but a blink of the eye to Larry it’s reasonable to assume he’s still a newbie despite his recent embrace of Twitter. The above quotes, by the way, come courtesy of ThinkProgress.

All of this should serve as a cautionary tale for brands that blog, or are considering doing so. If you don’t have anything to say, or are worried about filling the space, don’t use other people’s content and try to be clever by making it look like yours. The reality is that we would welcome Larry King or anyone else linking and using our content gratis, provided we are given proper attribution and a link.

If you steal anyway, as Larry King and CNN did, will you get sued? Most likely not, but you court a worse fate – that of the online pariah. You invite posts like this one, and their inevitable re-tweets and StumbleUpons to define your character online. That can do far more damage to your brand than a lawsuit.

As Warren Buffett is fond of saying (notice that attribution thingy again), “It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it.” This, from a guy who was well-known at my previous Berkshire Hathaway-owned company for not using e-mail.  In spite of that he clearly knows a lot more about the Internet than “blogger” Larry King.

UPDATE:

As of Tuesday morning, the post on Larry King’s blog was updated to include attribution to myself with a link back to SearchViews embedded under my name.  Hopefully this will be standard practice going forward for the Larry King blog.

Questions or comments? Feel free to leave them here or check out Reprise Media folks on Twitter.

On a search engine reply page a good direct response ad can be gold, indicating clearly and relevantly to the user that you got, to paraphrase James Brown, what they need.

In Search 3.0 however, those intangible qualities that are associated with brand marketing come tromping onto the reply page like a high school marching band playing “Louie Louie”, whether marketers want them to or not.

Where even now most reply pages are made up of links to relatively static websites on the left with a short snippet description and search ads on the top and right rail, as Search 3.0 takes hold reply pages are going beyond what even universal search had to offer. Already a Wikipedia entry is likely to be sitting In one of the top five results.

Soon, as reply pages are re-organized, even more content from Twitter search results, Facebook pages, individual blogs, as well as YouTube videos will be jostling for attention. The paid search ad is still an important entry point – a way to lead searchers directly and unambiguously to take an action.

What muddies the water around it are the potential for negative social media commentary to show up on that reply page – or positive commentary about a competitor in a more generic search. For now, direct marketers can mostly ignore the existence of these but as the segregation between search and social media breaks down that option will no longer exist.

It’s also important to point out that people are using social media for directional information in some cases before going to a search engine. They might ask their Facebook network something like “Have you guys ever bought a vacuum cleaner?” If one of the responses was “Yeah, I bought a Brand X and it died after a year,” your ad in search for Brand X is going to struggle mighty hard.

This in no way is meant to imply that brand marketing will “kill” direct marketing – it can’t. What it does mean is that direct marketers have to either learn how brand marketers are already using social media to listen, interact, and seed information on behalf of their brands or alternately join forces with brand marketers who can help even the odds that your message will make it to the consumer unmolested.

For brands looking for help, marketers who know how to do both already have a clear advantage in this new landscape.

Questions or comments? Feel free to leave them here or check out Reprise Media folks on Twitter.

In Search 2.0, optimizing for search engines was achieved in part by link building and sharing with other websites. While this is still a valid part of strategy in Search 3.0, the new wrinkle is that the platform size and strength has moved up a level from individual websites to social media sites, interlinked and connected loosely with each other and directly through well-optimized profiles.

Thus, I saw the video of Susan Boyle singing on Britain’s Got Talent  through Twitter, but four days later my wife saw it on Facebook. Other people were exposed to it on YouTube first (where a single clip has received an astounding 33 million views, with several other clips cresting the million view mark) or via blog posts like this one. Add to this the plethora of coverage about her that has sprouted up in media on and offline – which are spawning even more links.

The spread of the video was organic for the most part but the lesson here for marketers is the flipside of what we talked about with social media slosh and the Domino’s Pizza debacle last week. Marketers can take advantage of the growing symbiotic relationship all of these social networks have with each other to promote their brands and their message.

Social media profiles are one of the most important building blocks to achieve this. Brands need to have a visible presence in Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and on relevant sites where people are likely to talk about them in forums.

The next step is often overlooked: Link your profiles together. Crosslinking them increases their cross-platform power and helps profiles to rank higher on search engine reply pages. Remember, engines are ranking social media profiles in results in part based on the power and quality of the links coming in and out. Increasingly, social media profiles are ranking in the top searcg engine results pages for brands as well.

Once brands have a sturdy, crosslinked network across social media sites they are ready to push out content in a more powerful way than ever before. Twanging multiple strings of the spiderweb ensures that you reach folks along each strand and set up an echo chamber that hits influencers hanging out right in the middle.

Granted, it helps to have something interesting to say – don’t expect that narcolepsy-inducing video of your CEO’s sales meeting presentation to become the next online sensation.  On the other hand don’t only use your profiles to push out individual campaigns. Ultimately you should view them as part of your branding strategy and keep some level of engagement on at all times.

That way when you do have a big story, message or new product to shout about, you will already have a multitude of voices ready to shout along with you. Or sing, as the case may be.

Questions or comments? Feel free to leave them here or check out Reprise Media folks on Twitter.

Reprise Media Managing Partner Joshua Stylman shared his take on this in a post for Advertising Age’s Digital Next column. He makes a number of important points there but I want to highlight one line in particular that should be taken to heart by anyone engaging in search and social media marketing (and indeed any online marketing):

“Regardless of your individual perspective, the one certainty is that there has never been a lower barrier to produce and distribute content for others to see. With that emerges a new responsibility for people (and companies as well) to think about their own digital footprint.”

When I spoke to Josh about this he elaborated in a way I found striking – saying (and I’m paraphrasing here) that we operate online as our own media channels now – from a corporate level right on down to the individual.

I am a Camera

What complicates this is that people “tuning” into your channel through a search engine can be presented with programming that isn’t in keeping with an older idea of how media works. The television age conception was of media as a guest in our living rooms. Well, now the living room comes to the guest – and sometimes it ain’t pretty.

Part of this is due to the fact that, as Facebook acknowledged, the “delete” button doesn’t mean “erase from Internet.” That doesn’t exist. Pop it onto Facebook and its liable to be downloaded by someone else and re-uploaded to their page, reside in their message box, used on someone else’s blog – you name it.

The same is true of blog posts and news content about your brand. A popular blog or a major news outlet can carry a lot of weight with search engines and keep an unflattering story on top of search results like a cork bobbing on the ocean for years after it’s first published.

Owning Your Channel

A counter measure is to create your own channel – a company blog, a user forum, a highly interactive website, and pump out interesting content.  Just be prepared – opening your channel up so that users can interact and comment on your content is a double-edged sword.

The reality is that having comments and interactions on your channel are good – even if they are sometimes negative. Where this gets tricky is when they become abusive.

The Julia Allison Effect

Julia Allison has been plastered on the cover of Wired and ranted about from every corner of the Internet primarily because she has maximized her channel as a blogger. She exists as a self-promoted object. This naturally creates a great deal of ire amongst some folks who blog about hating her, Twitter about hating her, and have dedicated Tumblr blogs to hating her.

Tumblr took notice of five of these blogs recently and took them down for violating their new terms of service. Their explanation was that they see Tumblr as a community rather than as a collection of blogs. In other words – Tumblr is a channel. That may well be so, though it seems to have come as a surprise to many who thought their Tumblr blogs were their personal platforms.

Tumblr is attempting to create a “safe space” for their users, a notion that is not unusual in places like Facebook where people of many ages and backgrounds interact, but is a bit new on a site that is personal content-creation oriented.

The best recourse for all of this is to grow a thick skin and concentrate on keeping your own channel thriving. Julia.

Revenge of the Visitors

In my whole convoluted visitors and living rooms scenario, I talked about the rise of social media as bringing the living room to the visitor. Most often a search engine is the vehicle for this. However we are right on the cusp of some profound shifts that should put more power in the hands of the vistors and living rooms alike. Vacuum cleaners sadly will be left out.

In part we are seeing this happen slowly on the search engine side with the increasing personalization of search results. This is being slowed somewhat by privacy concerns, but that’s not an issue when people volunteer information that helps to target their results.

A better picture of this can be seen on social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter. We choose what we receive to an extent based on who are friends are or who we decide to follow. If I hear too much Julia Allison jibber-jabber on Twitter I can unfollow that person (or channel) and I never have to hear it again.

This holds true increasingly when it comes to seeking information as well as receiving it.  Is Google the best place for me to search for WordPress tips, or am I better off going to people I’m following on Twitter?  After all, I’ve pre-screened them for relevance.

With Facebook and LinkedIn Groups I can do a further level of screening to categorize the information I receive and seek – basing it on interest (whether it be WordPress or M.I.A.) or geography or potentially both (New York M.I.A fans anyone?)

Creating Your Own Channel Collection

In this way, the “safe space” is created by users, not by the platform. There’s no question in my mind that Google and MSN in particular are trying to add the tools into search that will allow users to take more control over what results are served up.

For marketers this opens up new challenges and new opportunities to reach people in an even more targeted way. Official brand sites will want to offer more interaction and relevant content to be included in people’s channel collection. Branded YouTube channels are just the tip of the iceberg in this.

Search advertising may also be targeted even more precisely, with many more variations on copy to reach ever- thinner slices of the market.

Questions or comments? Feel free to leave them here or check out Reprise Media folks on Twitter.

We did some Digg promotion in the past for SearchViews but the number of people required to get anything to really go viral never equaled the effort we had to put in. Recently a colleague asked me why I don’t do more Digg promotion of posts again and I simply said, “Why bother.”

To really make it work I would have to build up a network of tens if not hundreds of folks, probably through mutual story digging. This chain digging is what drives most of the top Digg submissions these days.  As my grandmother used to say “Who has the time?” It helps to picture a little old lady shrugging her shoulders.

More to the point, as cadres of mutual backscratchers have overrun Digg’s system, the true value of getting anywhere other than the top 5 highlighted slots diminishes exponentially.

This is already affecting Digg’s business model – today they announced a layoff of 8 workers or 10% of their small workforce. Growth has leveled out and more tellingly media (Reprise and otherwise) darling Twitter has surpassed Digg in users.

This last point is an important one, and not just because we can barely let a single post go by at SearchViews without mentioning Twitter in some way, shape or form. Twitter is proving to be an equally adept platform for disseminating content and so far at least hasn’t been susceptible to people trying to game the system.

I think a big factor in why Twitter has become a more useful platform than Digg for link sharing is that it’s more social – people do more interaction beyond links and that keeps them coming back. The absence of a built in ranking for links is actually helpful here in not encouraging rings of link spammers – as is a crowd that will unfollow you at the drop of a hat if they feel “marketed” to.

Unlike Digg where the primary activity is adding links and digging them, Twitter fosters conversation and that means that time there building relationships doesn’t feel wasted.

Thoughts? Comments? Let us know in our comments section or hit me up on Twitter (duh!) @nmallin.

December

December’s post (and everybody’s) pointed out Ford’s Scott Monty as an example of someone proactively using social media to control a potential brand damaging situation. It’s called “Using Social Media to Put Out the Fire” and it goes a little something like this.

November

November spawned a monster, one we called “Using Bankruptcy to Gain Customers Online.” Thankfully most readers understood that we were advocating a proactive approach to handling bad news, rather than manufacturing bad news to gain search traffic. Because that would be stupid. This post also led to one of my favorite comments of the year.

October

October can be scary and so can surprises – like our post entitled “SERP-prise! Google Experiments with Banner Ads on Results Pages.” Oddly enough, it’s about Google’s experiments with banner ads on search results pages. Go figure.

September

Whether you hung out with September gurls, were hungover one September morn, or pleaded to be woken up when September ended, it appears you enjoyed the “Twitter Tap of Little Search Bot Feet”, an insightful and pithy post by Reprise Media’s Miguel Cancino or @mcancino to his Twitter friends. In it he explores the impressive SEO capabilities of Twitter.

August

August is typically a hot and muggy month, and we mugged our readers with a hot post called “Social Media: A Comment on Commenting, or, Would You Like Spam on That Post?” In it we explored what now seems like ancient history, namely the McCain campaign’s experiment in giving their followers perks for commenting on news stories and blog posts online.

July

July is a special month for us, a month in which Dr. Naveel delivered a squealing bundle of joy that would come to be named “Why Microsites Are Weakening Your SEO Results – Dr. Naveel Builds Your Immunity.” He drops some crazy science on the SEO world by warning about the improper use of microsites. And still, the surgeon general does nothing.

June

While we avoided any posts about the moon in June, we did open up a can of old fashioned whup-ass on aristocratic search marketing skeptic Steve Harty. Predictably we called this post “Reprise Media to Bartle Bogle Hegarty Honcho Steve Harty -You’re Wrong About Search Marketing.” It was our Dr. Seussiest title yet.

May

In May we were having a Coke, sans smile. “In No Search for Coca-Cola?” We marveled over Coke’s contention that they didn’t think search was an advertising channel that worked for them. Seriously? We are still marveling.

April

In April we asked the question “Social Networking: The End of Web Search?” Maybe not but as we pointed out in our predictions post it is morphing into an alternate set of search channels that in some cases will rival the big search engines for quality and usage.

March

We got all lion-like with the lambs at Ask.com with the timeless classic “Ask.com: The Algorithm is Not Available Right Now, Please Click an Ad Instead.” We delicately suggested that they might want to improve their search results rather than advertising improved search results in lieu of an actual improved search result. Capice?

February

February allowed us to celebrate the winning brands in our annual 2008 Superbowl Search Marketing Scorecard in a post we simply called “Super Bowl 2008: The Winning Brands.” Much rah-rah-ing ensued, though we kept the sis-boom-bahs to a minimum.

January

This brings us to both the beginning and end, appropriate for a month named for the two-headed Roman god Janus. Dr. Naveel dropped by to diagnose “A Case of Keyword Myopia.” His prescription was for marketers to not lose sight of the big picture by being too narrow with their keyword selection.

So here are our top 3 bullseyes and top 3 fails from last year:

Top 3 Bullseyes:

1.       RSS adoption will start to hit the mainstream – Yeah it’s happening, you just don’t know it (kind of like getting trashed on eggnog). Every time you download an iPhone app, use Twitter, or use a news aggregating site you make use of RSS. Like zinc oxide, it’s everywhere.

2.       The music industry will continue to be heavy handed and litigious rather than figure out how to monetize their product online – Today’s news that Warner Music is pulling its music vids off of YouTube is further proof that cluelessness still reigns in the music biz. Wait, I hear you asking, what about the fact that the industry announced they would no longer be suing individual users? Well, like any greedy plaintiff you want a defendant with deep pockets like an ISP, or an un-monetized start-up business like Project Playlist. Wait, a start-up what? That’s no way to make money guys! On the other hand we were thankfully wrong about  Hype Machine – they have remained unmolested by lawsuits (as far as we know).

3.       Yahoo’s Kickstart will fold – Kickstart was Yahoo’s attempt to rival LinkedIn in the realm of career social networking. What they didn’t know at the time they launched was how many of those folks looking for a job would end up being Yahoo refugees.

Top 3 Fails:

1.       Yahoo and Google get their social media act together – Our number 3 bullseye above was perfect, except we couldn’t leave well enough alone. We also had this idea that Yahoo would use personalized start pages to link people up with each other and build a real social network. Didn’t happen. We also roped Google into this and to be fair, they made some baby steps by adding SearchWiki to users who are logged in. Still, this brings them closer to actual social networking like Sarah Palin was a foreign policy expert because she could see Russia from her house.

2.       Government officials will start to adopt social networking/blogging as communication point with constituents – This was a major fail on the federal level. I mean seriously this is the Bush administration we are talking about, not exactly a paragon of open government. The president-elect is using YouTube as the medium for his weekly address so this still may come true next year.

3.       MySpace will lose ground to Facebook, becoming lost in the wind like Friendster – Not so fast, Facebook may have gained ground in leaps and bounds in 08 but MySpace got niche-y with it – becoming more focused on music and on their younger demographic. Let the olds use Facebook to connect with their fellow Class of ’79 members.

So we won a few and we lost a few. Stay tuned to SearchViews though, our exciting predictions for 2009 will be posted very soon. In the meantime feel free to send me your predictions, your thoughts, nay your very dreams,  on Twitter at @nmallin.

How bad is it out there? Let’s take this story from yesterday which is the flipside of my post last week about how Scott Monty and Ford are rocking social media outreach.  Ford’s cross-town car making rival Chrysler stuck their foot in it big time during the traditional auto industry preview show and tell with industry journalists. This is the time period before the Detroit auto show when the car companies reveal future product plans for the next few years in exchange for honoring an embargo agreement. While GM and Ford were sure to include bloggers Chrysler made it clear that they were not welcome. Stupid move.

Jalopnik, one of the top auto blogs, was so miffed that they contacted some of their mainstream press friends who did go and got the scoop on Chrysler’s plans from them. Since they weren’t invited (and when asked were turned down) they were not subject to the embargo agreement and posted it all. This was then reported by the other big auto blogs like, well, Autoblog, further spreading the embargoed material and the sordid story.

Why would Chrysler PR do something so completely boneheaded? Contempt, plain and simple.  Old school public relations practitioners simply don’t believe bloggers have the same standing as traditional media. The idea of writers who aren’t beholden to an editor or a publishing company, and who don’t necessarily rely (like the car buff magazines do) on ad pages to survive strikes fear into the heart of people who believe that managing coverage requires monetary leverage or the threat of being fired.

Had they listened to Chris Anderson’s talk yesterday they would know that bloggers write for a variety of reasons which can include money, enjoyment, and building their personal brands. Instead they were treated as untrustworthy pariahs.

Bloggers have also done their part to fuel the fire, with Michael Arrington at TechCrunch as Exhibit A.  While he’s right to call out clueless PR flacks who shill to sites regardless of relevance, the blanket statement that TechCrunch will no longer honor embargoes strikes at the heart of exactly what these PR folks fear the most.  Now I’ll grant that sending an embargoed press release to someone via e-mail without knowing what they are going to do with it is kind of dumb but this kind of hyperbolic response won’t stop the spamming and will confuse those on the PR side who really need to be educated. When I worked at Business Wire I used to counsel our clients to approach blogs gingerly and to get to know them rather than sending them information blind the way they might to a newspaper or magazine.

The spamming problem is exacerbated by the fact that many PR folks supplement their own contacts with e-mail lists supplied by third party companies like eNR. Even at the best of times the lists have inaccuracies and may not represent the best way to get in touch. It does allow the PR professional to show their client a longer contact list and feel that they are pushing their news out to a bigger audience more easily.

What would help is for the folks on the PR side of things to look at bloggers as media outlets, media outlets that are vastly different than what they have worked with in the past. The reality is that Arrington’s post notwithstanding, if you invite blogger’s in to a special event (as Ford and GM did) they are very unlikely to abuse that access. Being invited may not necessarily make them more money (though it might) or please a non-existent editor if it’s a one person operation, but it does pay those bloggers in other ways by speaking to what we referenced a few paragraphs ago – why they blog. Being allowed in increases their sense of being accepted as part of the industry they blog about, their status and personal brand rep, and ideally should be fun for them.  They won’t give that up just to break an embargo.

Even better, give bloggers exclusive web-ready content. The folks promoting the movie Watchmen did just that but releasing exclusive posters to specific blogs. Each blog got a different piece of artwork. In this case the blogs were pretty mainstream but imagine the impact on traffic this has had.

For bloggers, be patient with clueless PR folks. They are still learning how it’s done.  Well, many of them are anyway. The ones who are simply rude should be called out for it. This being said, there are plenty who do it right – encourage them to spread their teachings around.

Questions or comments? Follow me on Twiiter @nmallin