Lawrence Lessig and Chris Anderson an NYPL
Friday, September 29, 2006
So yesterday I had an opportunity to sit and listen to Wired magazine editor, Chris Anderson, and Creative Commons founder, Lawrence Lessig, talk at the New York Public Library. It was the now very familiar long tail subject matter, and I was hoping to hear more about the brewing DRM culture war that Lawrence as the creator of Creative Commons, is at the center of. In fact, there's a DRM protest demonstration being held at the Apple store this weekend. But alas, it was mostly about the long tail.
It's the first time I heard Lawrence speak, and this blog post is mostly about his style. Chris' long tail ideas evolved around a PowerPoint demo and charts and graphs, as he readily states, and when Lawrence got up to run his demo, you could see the glowing Apple logo on the top of his PowerBook, which led into a decidedly non-PowerPoint demo, which I recognized from the text transitions as Apple Keynote software. So, the Wired publisher had the charts and graphs, and the lawyer had the lively humorous videos.
But by far the most noteworthy part of Lawrence's demo was how he slickly "framed" the rest of the discussion. The demo talked about the read-only culture (RO) of mass consumption, and the read-write (RW) culture of neo-creative's who remix popular culture into their own art. And the last slide was an entirely black screen with the words "RO vs RW" big and centered in a way that RO ended up over Chris' chair and RW ended up over Lawrences.' And it just sort of stayed there for the rest of the discussion.
It worked at a very subconscious level, and I was looking around to see if anyone else appreciated the irony. No one mentioned it throughout the rest of the talk, which lasted over an hour. The discussion could have gone in almost any direction, but you could just feel from the nature of the questions that the conversation was "framed" as the read-only long tail consuming culture of Amazon and iTunes users vs. the re-mixing, copyright violating consume-and-resume anti-commercial culture of YouTube.
They seemed to agree on many point, and searched out where their points of contention were in order to make the discussion most interesting. And while they varied on some small points, they agreed on most, like the future of microtransactions. They both felt it was generally community-poisoning bad thing, whereas I [gasp] agree with Jason Calcanis in that quality creativity and a time commitment should be able to be directly rewarded. In fact, I fell that "being creative" should be a viable alternative to state lotteries, able to turn the creators into overnight millionaires.
But aside from the actual subject-matter of the talk, the most interesting thing I came away with was the contrast between Lawrence and Chris, and the very slick presentation style Lawrence used to "frame" the discussion. It was evidence of the power of an emotive presentation style over figures and statistics.Labels: Amazon, blog, The Long Tail, Youtube
posted by Mike Levin
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How We Help Clients
Wednesday, September 27, 2006
As an agency with a strong base of loyal clients, Connors strives to serve each and every client by maintaining strong relationships and continuing to provide valuable services in the areas of public relations and search engine optimization.
Each and every work day, the agents at Connors work hard for media placement and search engine authority on behalf of various clients. Once a week, the teams meet with each client to discuss how the project is going, what the accomplishments are for the past week and what the next steps should be. Then, taking the client's expertise in their industry along with Connors' expertise in PR and SEO, each team has an internal meeting each week to organize outreach and proactively plan what should come next. This puts Connors one step ahead, looking at what is working now and what will work in the future. This is why a client at Connors Communications does not just have a launch, but they have a launch followed by announcements, news, and profiles, and other timely coverage spread out over time. The same goes for blog coverage and other online outreach.
Helping clients means obtaining the goals that they give as well as using the expertise in the office to figure out what more can be done for optimal coverage. Then, working with the client, these ideas are explored and implemented as seen fit. It is this special attention, hard work, and proactive thinking that allows Connors to help clients each and every day in the office.Labels: Connors Communications, pr, seo
posted by Jessica Ek
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PR Bloggers
Tuesday, September 26, 2006
Robert Scoble wrote that blogging is existing and that this word of mouth network is the new PR. If you want your idea out there and you want your news to matter, it needs to be in the blogosphere and people need to be talking about it. A company's own employees can be talking or bloggers can be talking about the company. Either way, someone needs to be saying something on a well-respected blog in order to get anyone online to listen. It's an interesting idea. Connors is a PR firm that blogs and also reaches out to bloggers. Connors blogs, therefore it is.Labels: blog, Connors Communications, pr
posted by Jessica Ek
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Blogger Relations
But why is are blogger relations so vital in today's PR world and how does one go about wooing these new influential writers?
A lot of attention has been focused to blogger relations recently. Guy Kawasaki wrote a blog entry on how to suck up to bloggers, talking about building contacts before they are needed as well as paying attention to the helpful influence of schwag. BusinessWeek's Nichola Saminather also covered the topic in "Buttering up the Blogosphere." The idea that blogs and the Internet have changed the path of information dissemination is starting to sink in and go mainstream. Bloggers are important and we need to be paying attention because buzz is being generated by the blogosphere and spreading to more traditional media instead of the other way around.
Okay, so blogs are important, but how do you reach bloggers? Of course, one of the main lessons is that you have to read the blog, understand the blog, and write to that specific blogger as opposed to a mass email. This should be obvious. When you're sending out news and want it to get picked up, who exactly will a generic blast email work on? The next lesson is that if the news you're pitching is good, it will most likely get picked up. This is much the same as traditional PR outreach, just adapted for a new medium and a different type of news source.
The main difference is the role that PR plays. In traditional media, there is a symbiotic relationship between PR professionals and journalists. The relationship isn't always easy, but at least there is some mutual respect. PR agents need journalists to get coverage for clients and journalists needed PR people to make their jobs easier and to help them find news, trends, interviews, and research for their stories. Bloggers don’t have the same deadlines or need to post “new” news. They can break a story or take a break and comment on other stories going on at the moment. They don’t need the constant flow of information from you and other bias sources and would often prefer to find it themselves. So, while PR people have something to offer in the way of interviews and a heads up on news, it is often viewed with skepticism and mistrust. That brings us back to why Kawasaki's emphasis on building up the relationships with bloggers before you need their help and how this is of vital importance.
When a blogger recognizes you as an interested reader, sees a link you've given to the blog or insightful comment you've left, that is when you can begin a dialog. Engaging one influential blog that focuses specifically in the area of your client's news will get you more targeted, worthwhile coverage than a massive campaign to get the news to everyone. If they don't hear about it all, it won't get covered, but if they do find out and it's not from you, the buzz will be louder. And that's the key to the blogosphere.Labels: blog, pr
posted by Jessica Ek
High Tech Public Relations Savvy
Monday, September 18, 2006
I made a post on the HitTail site about high tech public relations savvy, and thought it appropriate to cross-link it here. Excerpt:
This technique can be quickly activated on your old system today, so you get all that traffic in the meantime that you would otherwise be leaving on the table. We're a PR firm that can discuss your Web strategies down to that level of detail. We have employees on staff who have programmed entire enterprise systems. Labels: HitTail, HitTail Plus, pr
posted by Mike Levin
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