New RSS Services

NewsGator has been busy! Here's the latest:

03-28 NewsGator Technologies, an RSS platform company, announced NewsGator Inbox 2.6. Previously known as NewsGator Outlook Edition, the new offering includes clippings synchronization with the NewsGator Online Web-based RSS aggregator, integration with FeedStation, NewsGator's podcatcher, and the ability to view Web pages while working offline.

03-28 NewsGator Technologies also announced FeedDemon 2.0. The new version of the company's desktop RSS aggregator for Windows adds seamless synchronization with the entire NewsGator Online platform, and improvements in usability and system performance.

Outted by Plaxo

Anybody who uses Plaxo to keep their Outlook Address Book up-to-date should be warned: you can blow the news of a job change or company acquisition simply by updating your own Address Book entry!

I know a guy whose company was acquired by another company. It was to remain a secret until a later date, but he went ahead and changed his contact information in his Address Book--and lo and behold pretty soon hundreds of his contacts received Plaxo updates that included his new title, employer and contact info.

Within hours, there were blog and news postings about the acquisition and they had to speed up plans for their announcement of the acquisition.

PR is Stale at Yale

Yale recently admitted a former top Taliban official as a student and refuses to answer questions about it. This is the same Yale that refuses to allow the establishment of an ROTC group on campus. Anti-military and pro-Taliban? On an American campus? Gosh!

From today's Opinion Journal:

"Yale is practicing a most unusual media strategy," says Merrie Spaeth, a public relations executive whose father and uncle went to Yale. "I'd call it 'Just say nothing.' " Another PR expert characterized Yale's strategy as "Trust that people will lose interest in the questions if there are no answers."

Pretending that your crisis will go unheralded and it will all go away if you simply don't answer questions is a guarantee that your crisis will be blown into bigger proportions than ever. Yale responded to the Wall Street Journal writer by saying it wouldn't respond. Perhaps the communications officer is a former member of the Bush Administration. Bush is, after all, a Yale alumni and heads an administration that famously makes poor use of proven communication strategies.

Here are some tips on crisis communications:

• Before a crisis hits, you should have a crisis management team established, including key officers, a spokesperson, and a communications strategist (if not the spokesperson);
• As soon as a crisis storm starts to brew, start pulling together the necessary facts (the who, what, where, when, why, and how);
  Be quick to share the information you think the media should have and will want to have;
  If they don't get the information from you, they'll get it from somewhere else--sometimes giving information is painful, but it's better coming from you than someone else;
  Don't shoot from the lip--if you don't have the answers, say you'll find out and get back to them;
• During or after a crisis is a great time to demonstrate that your organization is a good civic citizen--do something good for the community;
• Don't act like Yale.

Speaking of speaking...

Yesterday I was the guest speaker to a Washburn University "senior seminar" class of Mass Media students. I spoke to them about lessons along the pathway of my career.

While I was talking about some of my key rules for managing your career, the big rule that I should have remembered was to bring bottled water with me. By the end of my 45 minute spiel I was so cotton-mouthed that I sounded like Harry Belafonte (without all of the ridiculous political statements, of course).

Can your CEO speak better than Jon Stewart at the Oscars?

I didn't watch much of the Oscars. It was a bad movie year--the ones I enjoyed weren't nominated for hardly anything and the ones that did likely won more for their appeal to the liberal glitterati of Hollywood than for their artistic merit. I've heard that Jon Stewart didn't go over well as host, which is somewhat surprising to me--but Bulldog Reporter has pulled out some lessons that PR practitioners can glean from his example:

1. Don’t assume your client who speaks well in front of 20 people in his or her own conference room can make an instant transition to speaking in front of 100 people in a convention center.
2. Don’t assume your client who speaks well in front of 100 people can make a smooth transition to speaking in front of 1000 at a trade conference.
3. Help your clients get conformable with the size and sound of the room by rehearsing in the same room where they will be giving a speech.
4. Any new technical equipment (e.g., wireless mics, TelePrompTers, lights) needs to be rehearsed with in advance—not used for the first time in front of a real audience.
5. Help your clients build their confidence levels by exposing them to increasingly larger audiences—don’t make them jump from an audience of five to 500 in one presentation.
6. Rehearse, rehearse, rehearse (and do it with video).

Measuring the Influential Experts on Business Blogging

Onalytica decided to measure influential experts on business blogging and makes some good points about the difference between popularity and influence:

When Technorati ranks blogs they count the number of link sources pointing to a blog. So a blog that has 10 inbound links has higher rank than one that has 5 inbound links. So far so good. The blog with inbound links from 10 different sources is clearly more popular than the one with 5 link sources. However, when they use this measure of popularity as “authority” they are stretching it too far. David Letterman may be popular when it comes to the topic of US national politics, but few would call him an authority on the topic.

Check out the findings at the end of the post. It may lead you to some very helpful information on the topic.

iSift

I've become a fan of Digg.com, where you have the opportunity to vote for stories that you "digg" and raise its ranking on the page. More popular articles get higher placement, and rather than being chosen by an all-powerful editor who uses his own subjective bias to determine ranking the big stories are the ones most popular with the readers.

Here's a new one: iSift. From their home page:

iSift.com is a community for publishing and rating Internet-related news and content. Submit content or vote for submissions that you think are interesting. You can also give a story a negative vote. iSift has been inspired by digg.com and del.icio.us but places a greater emphasis on independent news and content.

Does blogging help or hurt?

This Bulldog Reporter op-ed makes the case that blogging may not be all it's cracked up to be. He advises against jumping into the latest "craze" and, instead he advises "increasing investment in real advocacy education and civic debate in order to achieve goals." He says that blogs encourage people to only tune into messages that reinforce their currently held beliefs rather than exposing themselves to alternative viewpoints. This is valid because blogs that one visits are most commonly linked to other blogs that support the same viewpoint. But then again, so what?

Blogging is going to happen whether you "invest" in it or not. Who do you want to influence? In business, you want to invest in communications that targets most likely consumers. If you sell toilet paper, you're going to have an audience of just about anybody--but who wants to go to a blog about toilet paper and its uses anyway? Blogging is effective when it draws a crowd of people with specific interests and engages them in dialogue. Operating a blog and engaging those who operate blogs that target those with a common interest is smart business, and there are few communication tools out there that could do it more effectively than blogging.

Even if you're a politician or a civic organization, why not blog? I don't get the point of arguing against it. You want to energize your base with a blog and keep your natural constituency informed. Those on the other side will do the same. Those in the mushy middle will have blogs of their own and may visit blogs on the right or left. Blogs may spread false propaganda, like tabloids in the checkout lane, but they can also accomplish for you what the MSM won't. You don't have to look further than Rathergate to know that the blogosphere can hold the MSM accountable.

To me, it's all good.

The Voicemail Opportunity

My friend Cyndi Menzel, Communications Director of the Kansas National Education Association, doesn't waste an opportunity. Her email messages are always signed with the organization's tagline: "KNEA: Making Public Schools Great for Every Child." And her voicemail echoes the same message. She concludes her voicemail message with something along the lines of "We're busy making public schools great for every child."

I'm shocked at how many people waste the voicemail message opportunity. Not only do they blow it by not even using the name of their company, they fail to seize the chance to emphasize their brand message.

I cringe when I call someone on their work number and their voice mail says something like, "Hello, this is Bud. Leave a message and I'll call you back." Yuck!

Sad to say, many calls find your voicemail more than they find you. What is the experience you are offering your callers? If they have made it through voicemail hell to get to your extension, make it pleasant and your message to the point. Don't do the ordinary, lame message. It is not just your business brand, but your personal brand that is being wasted.

Here is a nice article on other ways to promote your personal brand.