Tag Archives: google

Michael Arrington isn’t a journalist

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Twitter Boxing GlovesIf you’ve been obsessed with the Tour de France and haven’t been checking any other media outlets this week (raises hand), you may have missed the Internet scandal/dust-up/spat of the week between Michael Arrington at TechCrunch and the boys at Twitter. It’s been blogged to death, so I’ll keep this one short.

The :20 second summary is that a hacker got access to Twitter’s corporate Google accounts, got hold of a bunch of confidential documents about Twitter’s strategic plan and financials, e-mailed them to TechCrunch, and Arrington published (some of) them. Ev, Jack and Biz at Twitter cried foul and are getting lawyers involved. Many people have denounced Arrington’s decision as unethical. He’s keeping some of the documents suppressed (for now) at Twitter’s request.

Guy Kawasaki (seriously, this is the most name-dropping post I’ve ever written) slapped up a copy of the Society of Professional Journalists Code of Ethics up on his Posterous page last night, circling the following tenet:

Journalists should avoid undercover or other surreptitious methods of gathering information except when traditional open methods will not yield information vital to the public. Use of such methods should be explained as part of the story

But, let’s all remember that bloggers, like Arrington, aren’t journalists. They don’t operate under a professional code of ethics. they don’t report to an editor or publisher who tells them what to write about or what they can or can’t reveal. Many of them are ethical, many of them are former journalists, many of them would have chosen not to publish the documents.

Credibility is what’s keeping traditional media alive. Readers respect and trust publications and news outlets that do operate under a code of ethics like SPJ’s. This may be a short-term win for Arrington, but over time stunts like this are going to erode (what’s left of) reader’s respect for TechCrunch.

From the standpoint of a PR professional or a corporate communicator, we can’t forget that bloggers operate under their own rules. They aren’t necessarily motivated by the truth or by serving the public or by being objective.

We can’t count on them doing the right thing.

Image via Flickr user KayVee.INC

Small businesses: It’s 2009! Get a Web site!

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tonks22In October I became a cat owner. I’d like to think that I’m not one of those freaky obsessed “cat ladies” but the hundreds and hundreds of digital pictures on my computer of my “girls” would probably convince you otherwise. Nevertheless, one of the first things I had to do when we got the kittens was to find a good veterinarian.

Being relatively new to the area, I had no prior experience with local vets and I didn’t really even have anyone that I could ask. I wanted some place that was close to my home and that looked decent. I went to Google. I searched, as just about any reasonable person would, for “veterinarian” + my city and state. Only about three results came up (I live in the sticks) and I selected the one closest to my house.

In the end it turned out to be a great little place called Homestead Animal Hospital. I’d highly recommend them – but I won’t be doing it with a link because they don’t have a Web site.

I understand that small and local businesses often don’t have huge Web development budgets or in-house staff that knows how to create a Web site. But this is 2009. There’s really no reason to not have claimed out a little portion of the Web. Maybe you don’t want to be bothered with a domain name and Web hosting. Fine. Get a Tumblr or Posterous page. Make a simple WordPress.com blog. Do something so that people can get some basic information about your business and share it with their friends. It’s as critical today as the sign post on the front of the business or listing in the yellow pages used to be 20 years ago.

I need information in order to make my decision. If I do a Google search and am confronted with businesses who have a Web site versus those who don’t, I’m much more likely to investigate, and ultimately patronize, the one with a Web site. Even if it’s not a particularly good one.

With a business like an animal hospital, just think of the existing engaged community you could tap into. Run a photo contest where your customers submit their favorite pet pictures. Add some links to resources on animal behavior. At the very least, post profiles and photos of each doctor or technician and the location and the hours of the practice. It would hardly take more skills or knowledge than knowing how to type and upload a picture for someone in the practice to maintain a simple site.

In the end, Homestead Animal Hospital got my business (likely for life) because they were pretty much the only result returned for my town. But if I had lived in a bigger area and conducted the same search and Homestead had been one of five or eight or 20 results, they wouldn’t have even made the cut for me to investigate further. And that’s a shame, because they’re an outstanding veterinary practice.

No one can afford to ignore the Web anymore, no matter how small or local your business is. And with so many simple tools out there, no one needs to.

Photo credit: Me. That’s my baby girl Tonks.

To Europe, Courtesy of Social Media

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I’m on vacation right now. While you’re reading this, I’m off exploring museums, architecture, parks and cafes. Monsiuer Mengel and I are spending two weeks in Amsterdam, Brussels and Paris. And in large part, it’s due to social media. Here’s my guide to European Vacation, social media-style.

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1. Win free airfare by entering a blog contest

Yes, be jealous. We flew business class on OpenSkies from JFK to AMS courtesy of tickets I won from travel blog Gadling.com. The site was celebrating its anniversary by giving a pair of tickets away. All you had to do was leave a comment on their blog post and one commenter was randomly selected to win the tickets. That just happened to be lil’ ol’ me!

2. Start following various travel resources on Twitter

Over the past few months, I’ve been following accounts such as @raileurope and @visitholland. Both were helpful in offering information that allowed me to plan and make decisions about our trip. If I happened to notice a tweet about something I wanted to do or read more about on our trip, I would favorite the tweet as a way of bookmarking. A week before leaving, I went back and read through those favorited tweets and made some notes. I also enlisted help from local Albany twitterers for suggestions on the best way to get down to JFK (turns out this is the fastest and cheapest option).

3. Read travel blogs and bookmark content on Delicious and Evernote

I regularly read Gadling, Budget Travel’s This Just In and the New York Times Travel section/blog. Anytime I came across an article offering tips, advice or deals on the cities we were visiting, I bookmarked them via Delicious and tagged them as Europe. Sometimes I chose the “Do Not Share” option in Delicious, just so I wasn’t constantly sending out random articles via FriendFeed. Before the trip, I logged in to Delicious and sorted by the “Europe” tag, printing and highlighting any specific information I wanted to take with me. I also had a few conversations with friends who’d been to Amsterdam and captured their suggestions in an Evernote file that I can refer back to.

4. Check out hotels using TripAdvisor and Hotels.com review boards

We’re quite lucky in that we’re staying at a friend’s empty apartment while in Paris, but I needed to book hotels for Amsterdam, The Hague and Brussels. I relied heavily on the TripAdvisor message boards to make sure I wouldn’t be checking us in to a filthy hotel in a seedy part of town. (Sometimes there’s a reason for seemingly good hotel deals.) I also cross checked the amenities listed for each hotel with reviews done by people who had actually stayed there (is breakfast really free? Do they have WiFi in the rooms or just the common areas?).

5. Use Google StreetView to get the lay of the land

The apartment we’ll be staying in when we get to Paris next week is a bit out of town, near La Defense. We located it on Google Maps and then used the StreetView function to find restaurants that our friend recommended, find a nearby grocery store, and determine what landmarks we need to look for to point us in the right direction when we pop up from the Metro.

6. Pack some good old fashioned guide books

Since I don’t have an iPhone (wah), I can’t take advantage of this totally slick Amsterdam app that would tell me what to see, where nearby restaurants are, what museums are open, and more. So I’ll have to count on Frommer’s, Lonely Planet, and some printed e-mails with recommendations from friends to help us plan out our days. But hopefully next time I head to Europe, it’ll be with an iPhone that can calculate exchange rates, pull up Metro maps, tell me current museum discounts and even translate French on the fly. Someday.

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So, that’s how I got here. I’ve scheduled a few posts for while I’m gone, so hopefully you won’t miss me too much. And I plan to check in every now and then with the laptop to see how everyone’s doing and share a photo or two. I trust y’all to hold down the fort.

Until I get back… Vaarwell – Tot ziens – Au revoir!

Image via Flickr user pedrosimoes7

Why Lee Aase is Mayo Clinic’s Social Media MacGyver

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It’s no secret that Lee Aase and the Mayo Clinic have embraced social media. Blogging, podcasting, YouTube… you name it and they’ve experimented with it, and in most cases been successful. I was fortunate enough to sit in on Lee’s session at the 2009 Ragan Corporate Communications Conference: “The $4 a week online newsroom and other MacGyver Tips.”

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Lee (who is much taller in real life than expected) was kind enough to post his presentation to his blog. He shared simple secrets for quickly and effectively building a social media presence. While a lot of the tools he shared weren’t necessarily new, the reasons for using them in certain ways and the approach taken at the Mayo Clinic were what really got me thinking. Here are a few examples:

1. The Mayo Clinic has three blogs, and all are hosted at WordPress.com. They pay ~$10 a year to repoint the domain name to a mayoclinic.org site. My initial thought was, “Why aren’t they using WordPress.org and self-hosting the blog?” After all, it offers far more in the way of plugins, themes and features. (Click here for a quick explanation of the difference between these two platforms.) But Lee made a few great points. By hosting with WordPress.com, his team doesn’t have to go through the clinic’s corporate IT department. They don’t have to deal with firewalls, internal servers or just generally bogged down IT processes. Secondly, hosting the blogs on WordPress.com brings them more traffic. The Mayo Clinic blogs are often featured on the front/login page of WordPress.com, allowing many people to discover the blog that way. WordPress.com also has fairly simple analytics built in to the platform, so no one on their staff needs to go in-depth learning the ins and outs of Alexa or Google Analytics. And by repointing the domain name, they preserve the ability to eventually move to a different platform and not lose all of their search ranking.
Key Takeaway: Don’t always opt for the most advanced tool. Pick simple tools that reduce entry barriers allow you to get started.

2. With an existing “Medical Edge” radio show, the Mayo Clinic was already in the habit of content creation. It converted this show to a podcast and pushed it out through its blog. It’s also easier for busy doctors to record audio or video than it is to get them to write out a blog post. With a $150 Flip Video camera, Lee and his staff can interview doctors and researchers and post excerpts to the blog quickly and with minimal editing. There’s no need to invest in expensive A/V equipment and the training required for communications team members to use it.
Key Takeaway: Use existing content to ease your organization into social media. Find out the easiest way to get people to contribute (audio, video, writing) so that they’ll be more willing to participate.

3. “Don’t just pitch the media, be the media.” Lee agreed that this was somewhat overstated, but essentially the Mayo Clinic is creating its own content and that content is driving interest from traditional, mainstream media. The Mayo Clinic’s news blog has become a place for journalists to access information on Mayo Clinic research, publications, public health experts and patient stories. Lee’s even been successful with keeping certain posts embargoed and only accessible to journalists before releasing to the public. The content that the clinic creates and shares on its social media outposts has been picked up by national news outlets including CBS and the Wall Street Journal. Videos posted to The Mayo Clinic’s branded YouTube channel have been published online alongside news stories. Having so much rich content available in so many forms (blogs, audio, video) makes the media relations team’s job that much easier – in many cases the journalists are calling them to ask about content that’s been posted.
Key Takeaway: Create and share your organizations own original content. Make it interesting so that journalists will want to know more. Develop content in a variety of formats so that any outlet can use it.

Lee’s presentation really emphasized that social media can be pretty simple. Don’t complicate things. Pick tools that let you get started right away, use content that’s already at your disposal, and offer it up in a variety of formats that make it easier for reporters and customers to gobble up.

For more goodness from Lee, enroll in his Social Media University, Global, and become a Smuggle!

No to Carrots, Yes to Pomegranates

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Shannon Paul, at her excellent and Very Official Blog, wrote earlier this week about a situation where a company tried to pitch her via a comment on one of her blog posts. The product had nothing to do with the topic she’d written about (using her grandma’s carrot cake recipe as a metaphor for sharing great content) and the pitch itself, for skincare products from a company called Yes-to-Carrots, came off as a “free billboard” advertisement. The story has somewhat of a happy ending, as the offending commenter later called Shannon to apologize. But trying to pitch via public comments shows a pretty incomplete understanding of effective blogger relations on the part of Yes-to-Carrots.

Pomegranates, however, are a different story. A few weeks ago, in my post about the changes to US Airway’s inflight magazine, I mentioned that part of the magazine included an excerpt from the new book Rubies in the Orchard, which is Lynda Resnick’s story of the founding and marketing of POM Wonderful pomegranate juice. I said I had read the chapter excerpt in the magazine and was likely to read the whole book at some point. It was merely a mention in a post that wasn’t really about the book at all, but two days later I received the following e-mail:

Amy,

I enjoyed your post, Blogs on Paper at 35,000 feet. Did you pick up the Rubies in the Orchard book yet? I’d be happy to send you some POM juice to enjoy while you’re reading.

Send me your contact info and I’ll get you some juice within a week or so.

Cheers,
Jeff

I sent them my address, more to see what happened than anything else. Today, I received a package in the mail with a case of POM Wonderful juice, a personalized letter, and a fact sheet about pomegranates and their health benefits. I didn’t intend to blog about their outreach, as it’s really nothing new and bloggers are frequently targeted and pitched. But POM Wonderful’s efforts were in such stark contrast to what I read about on Shannon’s blog that in the end, I did end up writing about them again (although I’m sure they’re sad to learn that my blog’s audience is about 15 readers, including my dad). Perhaps most importantly for them, however, is that they’ve gained a customer: I really did like the juice and will probably buy it.

I’m sure Yes-to-Carrots and POM Wonderful both ended up at Shannon’s and my blogs, respectively, via a Google alert on a certain keyword (although Shannon’s follow-up post seems to indicate that her commenter may have been a regular reader). But what separates the carrots from the pomegranates was what they did with that info. POM Wonderful used it as an opportunity to send me a private e-mail. Yes-to-Carrots inappropriately posted a public comment to Shannon’s blog. As Shannon noted in her own comment, “I can’t think of an example where it would be a good idea to pitch someone in the comments.”

Even though Yes-to-Carrots did the right thing by calling Shannon to offer an apology and trying to start a dialogue with her, she stated that she might now be hesitant to buy a product that she already knew of and liked. Yes-to-Carrots potentially lost a customer because of botched blogger outreach. POM Wonderful gained a customer because they did a good job. Sometimes being a little seedy is a good thing.

Update: Jeremy Epstein, who posted the original Yes-to-Carrots pitch on Shannon’s blog, posted a “learn from my mistake” post at his own blog. Check it out - very impressive and goes a long way toward undoing the “damage” from the initial comment, in my opinion. Kudos to Jeremy!