Blogosphere Relations?

Great post on blogosphere relations with four bullet points.  The main take away for me is a reiteration of the importance of a voice with conversation style crossed with branding.  And you are the brand.

To succeed you must actively join in the conversation and be genuine.  Then you have skin in the game.  And the funny thing is once you have skin in the game, once you are PART of it, you won’t want to game the system anyway.  Your reputation is far too valuable to risk on a retainer.  So as always this leads us back to client selection being the primary challenge for the PR professional.  Find the good eggs first.

Creativity and Buzz – this is one big (and creative) advertisement!

From doc, another blatant repost, but you have to love this amazingly creative "big ad"!

And for the record, Doc Searls doesn’t know me from Adam, I just read his stuff.  What actually had me reading today was the commentary on the Daniel Lyons piece in Forbes called "Attack of the Blogs".  The Forbes blog article has suspense, public relations, poor crisis communication, dogs and cats, living together, just great stuff!  And it does make some good points about the role of blogs, journalists and public relations folks stuck in the middle of it all.

What strikes me the most is that Daniel Lyons, the author, takes a blogger-like-over-inflamatory tone specifically to create buzz.  And it worked. A full frontal attack on the blogosphere is really brilliant PR to for Forbes magazine to create buzz! Those clever people….  How else would I have logged into the Forbes site for the first time in my life (using bugmenot of course but that is beside the point).

So now the question is, will the next issue of Forbes issue a standard blogger-type-retraction-apology-move-on about some random detail in the article to complete the theme?  And what do you bet that the author has his google alerts set up with bloglines feeds watching and grinning?  Part of social software is the performance art aspect of flaming, and there is no better place to flame than the blogosphere.

I love creativity! Design that is not quite green, at least that is what the bitch said

I visited Texas A&M University last week and while walking under a thoroughfare ran into this design creation called "What is Design?". 

Why was it there?  Who knows, it is a college campus so there is no telling.  And the design is cool, but what is really cool is the notepad that was on it with commentary from the students in the creative process.  Here is the object, followed by the creative process which I will let speak for itself.

Direct Mail is Growing – Center for Media Reseach

This data from the "Center for Media Research" newsletter are interesting.  Direct Mail, meaning snail mail not email in this case, is growing at a healthy pace.  The data comes from a report by the Winterberry Group and I have not personally checked their research methodology.

The growing emphasis on personalization and one-to-one marketing methods has positioned database management and analytics services as the fastest growing segment of the marketing services value chain, projected to grow nearly 11 percent in 2005. Marketers are aggressively bolstering both their internal database marketing staff as well as outsourcing efforts; the result is a breakdown in traditional data silos, making way for databases that allow for segmentation based on demographic, behavioral and transaction data.

Projected Direct Mail Annual Growth Rates, By Vertical Market (2002-2007)
Financial Services/Insurance	8.4%
Hospitality	7.6%
Not-for-Profit	7.3%
Healthcare/Pharmaceuticals	6.6%
Publishing	6.1%
Automotive	5.1%
Telecommunications	4.8%
Financial Services/ Banking & Credit Cards	3.7%
Technology	3.0%
Retail (Non-Catalog)	2.7%
Source: Direct Marketing Association, Winterberry Group analysis

2005 Direct Mail Growth Forecasts
Direct Marketing Association	5.2%
Universal McCann	8.5%
Veronis Suhler Stevenson	5.5%
Winterberry Group	7.5%
Source: DMA, September 2005

For more details in the report, go here.

PR professionals’ voting rights

http://www.prweek.com/us/news/article/524540

NPC split on PR professionals’ voting rights

Mark Hand PR Week USA Oct 26 2005 20:14

WASHINGTON: PR professionals are mounting an impassioned campaign at the National Press Club (NPC) for passage of a constitutional amendment giving their two representatives on the club’s 14-member board of governors the right to vote.

The National Press Club, representing journalists and therefore print mags and newspapers, is actually more than half PR pros per the article.  Meanwhile bloggers are unionizing and also plan to deny all voting rights to those in the public relations profession.  OK, that last part isn’t true.