The Brinkwire blog

A PR site that honours embargoes

Posted on 01. Mar, 2010 by Andrew.

The issue around embargoes is tricky. Powerful media sites are saying they’re not happy with the concept and have no plans in honouring embargoes going forward. TechCrunch, in particular, hates the concept.

We’re a PR site. We honour embargoes – in fact, you can use Brinkwire to set a release time so your press release does not go live before the embargo date; although we find most companies use this feature to coordinate the timing of the release.

Last week TechCrunch started a little meme by pushing a short dialog between a PR and a site owner.

PR Pro: Hi I’m just checking you got the email I sent.

Blogger: When did you send it?

PR Pro: Five minutes ago.

Blogger: Oh. I get a lot of email.

PR Pro: Shall I send it again?

Blogger: No. What did it say?

PR Pro: I’d love to tell you, but you’ll have to agree to the embargo first.

Blogger: Ok whatever, I agree, now tell me more.

PR Pro: Can you email back first saying you agree to the embargo?

Blogger: I get a lot of email.

PR Pro: Please.

Blogger: Look, I honor the fucking embargo. Now tell me more.

PR Pro: A Silicon Valley based startup is going to announce a new revolutionary software as a service for social media companies targeting B2B. It will change the way social media marketing is done forever. Are you interested in a briefing with the company’s CEO.

Blogger: No, I don’t cover B2B.

PR Pro: But I thought you wrote about social media.

Blogger: I do, but not B2B.

PR Pro: But it is revolutionary.

Blogger: So are all the others.

PR Pro: Really?

Blogger: Yes. Look, when every new social media service is revolutionary it is no longer news.

PR Pro: I didn’t know that, but we are working on an API.

Blogger: I’m not interested.

PR Pro: Oh.

Blogger: Sorry.

PR Pro: Can I still email you the details?

Blogger: If you must.

PR Pro: And you’ll honor the embargo?

Blogger: Yes, I’ll honor the embargo. In fact I’ll make you a better offer.

PR Pro: Oh.

Blogger: I will honor the embargo for the rest of my working life. As I have no intention of writing about your new revolutionary software as a service for social media companies that will change the way social media marketing is done forever. So, yes, I’ll honor the fucking embargo.

PR Pro: I can’t thank you enough.

Blogger: It’s nothing. Really.

What’s given the meme that extra bite is the use of Xtranormal to turn the dialog into a short animation. Check it out.

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Manchester United is not China (via @Tim)

Posted on 20. Jan, 2010 by Andrew.

Tim Bradshaw of the FT has just tweeted to say the Manchester United press office is refuting claims in today’s blogs that players have been banned from Twitter. Tim quotes the Man U press office sa saying; “Entirely up to them.”

Paid Content has a good write up which asks “Is Manchester United the next China?” as it discusses the news the club was believed to be unilaterally banning its players from maintaining any form of social media presence on sites like Twitter and Facebook.

It may sound odd – but real time social is a huge problem for sports in the States. Matches tend to be scheduled to air on US TV, across multiple time zones, in a waterfall like chain of appearances. In other words; a match can be viewed live in New York in the morning but then air on TV on West coast some hours later.

The challenge that Twitter et al brings to this is that the fans can get an almost real-time stream of the play-by-play events without paying the extra subscription costs to a pay-for-view or waiting for the network running the match a few hours later.

The English premiership doesn’t have to battle with time zones but does have very lucrative pay-for-view franchises to protect.

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Matthew Watson’s (@mpwatson)’s PR filter for the AdAge 150

Posted on 13. Jan, 2010 by Andrew.

Matthew Watson has updated his complication of top PR blogs. He starts with the AdAge Power 150 and simply filters out anything that’s not strongly related enough to PR.

Topping the list is Danny Brown, a Canadian based blog that comes 33rd in the AdAge 150, then PR Squared and another Canadian blog by Dave Fleet. Everything PR, from Germany, ranks 5th on the Watson list and 96th and the first UK site is David Cushman’s Faster Future which just misses out on a top ten placement.

I’m just waiting for someone to start using AdAge 150 as a way to try and argue which skill set is best suited to social media – SEO, PR or a cross-digital marketer. Matthew says it’s a bit of fun while still being a fairly decent indicator for top PR blogs and we agree!

In the spirit of things the Brinkwire team has rushed together a quick (and mistaken ridden, no doubt) analysis of PR blogs by country based on Matthew’s original filter.

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More than 100 bloggers behind bars

Posted on 07. Jan, 2010 by Andrew.

Over at The Register, John Ozimek cites research from Reporters sans Fronieres to declare blogging is a dangerous business.

He notes there are more than 100 bloggers behind bars around the world. The problem is that in a few countries ‘online dissent’ is a criminal offence. We may automatically think of places like China, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Uzbekistan but there are also countries like Thailand and Tunisia.

Even in sunny Australia there’s the strong government intention of filtering as much as possible. Blogging powerhouse The Inquisitr has a good summary of the Great Firewall of Australia in a tag archive.

The Italian courts have also ruled that blogs are, in effect, newspapers. This wraps Italian bloggers up with a lot more red tape.

Ozimek concludes that the war against bloggers is heating up everywhere.

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Will Mashable join Tim Armstrong’s Aol empire?

Posted on 07. Jan, 2010 by Andrew.

Jon Silk’s written today of news that Aol may bid for Mashable.

Silk compares edgy TechCrunch to Mashable’s safer but just as popular content and suggests there is little wonder why its Mashable that’s talking to a big name buyer.

I’m a fan of many of the more geeky Aol blogs but don’t understand their RSS policy. You’re only allowed to use the RSS feeds provided by them – so no Yahoo Pipe filters. You’re also stuck if someone hits “share” on Google Reader as that means an RSS compilation from that contact, not from Weblogs, is responsible for delivering the content.

Anyway; niche debates about RSS aside – Mashable does seem like a good fit with the new Aol. Cashmore’s crew may even encourage the budding content empire to be more social media friendly.

Doesn’t this go against many predictions that Aol would focus on a Demand Media-style strategy of automating as much of the content generation as possible? Interesting times, interesting times…

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Gawker eases away from page views and to unique

Posted on 06. Jan, 2010 by Andrew.

The powerhouse that is Gawker Media is believed to be moving away from raw page views as a key measurement and towards unique visitors.

Website theAWL.com has what seems to be a leaked memo in which Nick Denton, Gawker big cheese, explains the shift.

“… some pageviews are worth more than others” and an item that gets picked up and draws in new visitors is worth more than “a catnip slideshow that our existing readers can’t help but click upon”.

Spot on. He’s right of course. It’s never been a challenge to design a site to generate lots of pageviews. In the battle for ABCE ratings here in the UK we even see mainstream newspapers put slideshows in non-Ajax, page-reloading, popup galleries.

What Denton wants is content that breaks on Twitter or even on TV. This means the excellent teams at Io9, Gizmodo, Kotaku and others will have to work harder for their pay.

The challenge of breaking news means being a quick second is less likely to produce the necessary results. A quick second keeps loyal readers happy as their RSS feeds and daily surfing brings them the news they need to know, the news that they later see people tweeting about or hear from their friends. A quick second is less likely to win that Twitter momentum than a genuine scoop.

We could see some dramatic shifts in blogging from the teams. We could well see a wider range of content appear on the blogs – as the bloggers cast their nets wider in order to lure in those uniques (and if they don’t come back for the next two months; good, they wouldn’t have counted anyway but at least this way they can be unique again). It is entirely possible to see Unique Visitor numbers rise while overall page impressions fall.

The shift in focus may well be good news for online PR and social media agencies too. Gawker’s bloggers may well be more interested in a wider range of news and certainly interested in a coordinated outreach program that might benefit their articles with traffic from fresh and original sources.

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The PR opportunities behind a tweet: @CoryBooker and @BigSixxRaven

Posted on 04. Jan, 2010 by Andrew.

This story has made it all the way across the globe to a snowy Scotland.

Seems the local residents in Jersey are also suffering from some unwelcome snowfall too. Local radio DJ (with the rather awesome name of Ravie Rave) noticed the authorities hadn’t shoved her 65-year-old father’s pavement she did something about it.

What did she do? Call the authorities? Nope. Shovel the snow herself? Use the radio to summon up help? No.

Rave used her Twitter account, @BigSixxRaven, to tweet the Newark Mayor Cory Booker. Mr Booker, you see, is also on Twitter as @CoryBooker.

Now Cory Booker already has a good reputation as a no-nonsense type of politician. I suspect he’s a savvy one too.  The major turned up at the snow covered walkway himself to do the labour. Not bad, huh?

This beats weeks of election spin. It’s an unexpected act that’s quirky enough to broadcast around the blogs. Both Rave and Booker will benefit from this.

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Glam’s new star shines the light on publisher and platform convergence

Posted on 12. Oct, 2009 by Andrew.

Here’s a question for you; is it harder to set up a successful online publisher or a ad banner display system?

A lot of people are beginning to figure out that it’s actually harder to be the successful publisher. The banner networks are commodities which can be picked up from the shelf, plugged in or swapped.

Glam Media, a network of blogs that claim a huge number of unique visitors, have just taken Josh Jacobs off Yahoo.

At Yahoo Jacobs ran the entire display ad platform. Before that he ran the publisher network. Josh Jacobs knows a lot about banner display and how that integrates with publishing.

This blogger thinks we’ll see more of this as we roll into 2010. In the UK we already have the Guardian newspaper with its own ad platform.

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The FTC and illegal social media campaigns

Posted on 05. Oct, 2009 by Andrew.

If your American social media campaign involved either paying bloggers to write about your products or events or you simply handed out free products to bloggers to review then you’ll now be in breach of today’s update from the Federal Trade Commission.

The old guide – last updated in 1980 – asked only that a reviewer made it clear when their experience of a product of service wasn’t likely to match the normal experience. If someone was reviewing a laptop and got given the a bespoke model with a turbo enhancement then they’d have to say that and that the laptops coming on sale were not going to be as good.

The new guide means bloggers must disclose any relationship. Here’s the quote;

The revised Guides also add new examples to illustrate the long standing principle that “material connections” (sometimes payments or free products) between advertisers and endorsers – connections that consumers would not expect – must be disclosed. These examples address what constitutes an endorsement when the message is conveyed by bloggers or other “word-of-mouth” marketers. The revised Guides specify that while decisions will be reached on a case-by-case basis, the post of a blogger who receives cash or in-kind payment to review a product is considered an endorsement. Thus, bloggers who make an endorsement must disclose the material connections they share with the seller of the product or service. Likewise, if a company refers in an advertisement to the findings of a research organization that conducted research sponsored by the company, the advertisement must disclose the connection between the advertiser and the research organization. And a paid endorsement – like any other advertisement – is deceptive if it makes false or misleading claims.

It seems likely that some brands – both large and small – will have to carefully back out of current strategies and into new ones.

Getting a blogger to review a product or a service can be hard. The FTC hasn’t made this impossible as disclosed reviews are still entirely possible and many bloggers have been disclosing reviews for months now.

A good first step in encouraging genuine reviews is making sure the blogging community is aware of the new product or service in the first place. Brinkwire’s press site uses blog recommendation widgets to show news headlines to bloggers. That works. Another approach is to have a running social media engagement/outreach campaign where you contribute to a real relationship with the blogger so that they’re much more disposed to writing a review when you have news.

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Does @iaintait have Google Wave invites? No! #iaintait

Posted on 02. Oct, 2009 by Andrew.

Take a minute to think about the fate of poor Iain Tait. Ian’s author of the rather good Crackunit blog and is currently unable to use Twitter due to a swarm of users who thinks he can get them a Google Wave invite. He can’t.

It started off well. A friend wanted to commend Iain and his influence in new media. That single tweet created the hashtag.

Then, tweet by tweet, the good natured banter led to the infamous tweet from Mark Earls which said; “RT @eskimon RT @iaintait 1,000 Google Wave invites2give away RT w/the hash tag #iaintait to get one.

As Iain says – that’s how it all started.

It shows that people will click that retweet button quickly and certainly before they investigate what they’re retweeting.

Iain’s now suffering an #iaintait mention every 10 seconds. As he says; “It is IMPOSSIBLE to put the genie back in the bottle”.

Ah. The power of social media.

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