Share on Facebook

Technorati Tags: Analytics, Apple, Boston, Enzee, iPad, Netezza, Reviews, Social Media, Social Media Club

Share/Save

Baker, author of the The Numerati and the keynote speaker at this years Enzee Universe User Conference in Boston, spoke with members of the Boston Social Media Club after his Enzee presentation at an event sponsored by Netezza at the Westin Waterfront Hotel.

Update: You can listen to the audio of Stephen Baker’s entire conversation with the Boston Social Media Club over at Todd Van Hoosear’s blog, ItsFreshedGround.com. Many Tech PR Gems readers recall that Todd launched TechPRGems way back in 2004, and honed his social media skills at Topaz Partners, along with a disproportionate number of other cutting-edge social media pioneers. Thank you Todd!

Baker co-wrote a prescient BusinessWeek cover story with Heather Green in 2005 about blogs, a topic he said had finally caught the attention of a BusinessWeek editor during the 2004 presidential campaign as a “force to be reckoned with.”

Sensing an uncertain future at BusinessWeek, Baker decided (in advance) to use the cover story as a vehicle to promote his first BusinessWeek blog, BlogSpotting. He envisioned the blog as “a little row boat that will allow us to float away when BusinessWeek sinks.”

Sure enough, Blogspotting had its highest traffic on its launch day, Baker said.

Baker credits the cover story for introducing him to the world of social media, “and that’s where the future was,” he said.

Ultimately Baker left BusinessWeek on his own terms last year, but he’s convinced that he would have been fired if he had stayed — along with many talented BusinessWeek reporters and editors who lost their jobs.

In a twist of fate, Baker’s blog beat at BusinessWeek beat provided him with the predictive powers that good data enables — and an early sense of print media’s impending doom.

“The two things I was covering in 2005 were social media and analytics,” he said. “If you think what killed Businessweek it was all the new media and all the choices that advertisers and readers had, and the power of Google to analyze data, target advertising, and beat the pants off of traditional media in that business. I feel like I covered the two industries that killed my job.”

Watch Stephen Baker at the Boston Social Media Club in this excerpt on YouTube.

Share on Facebook

Technorati Tags: BusinessWeek, media, print, Social Media

Share/Save

Sam is the founder and editor of Sam Whitmore’s Media Survey and is widely known as an authority when it comes to analyzing the tech media landscape — and predicting what’s next.

One of the reasons Sam is so good at what he does is this: Sam knows tech media from the ground up. A former media columnist for Forbes.com, Sam spent 14 years at Ziff-Davis Publishing, 12 at PC Week as a reporter, editor, columnist and editor-in-chief.

In the latest Topaz Partners PRobecast podcast, Sam sits down with Topaz Partners Co-Founder Tony Sapienza for a wide-ranging interview about the intersection of public relations and tech media in this era of rapid and continuous change.

Go on! Subscribe to PRobecast!

Share on Facebook

Technorati Tags: media, News, PR, PRobecast, Sam Whitmore, Tony Sapienza

Share/Save

Since those first days and weeks you and social media have laughed together, you’ve cried together, you’ve whispered nothings into SM’s ear. You’ve traveled the world. It’s been an affair to remember.

But let’s get real. You know — and I know — that you are feeling some buyer’s regret at this point. And so let’s get down to it. Let’s show our cards. Let’s go out on a limb here.

The brutal fact is that SM always seems distracted, focused on something or someone else, lacking in attention span to the extent that it’s embarrassing at parties. At first you deemed the cyberswedish accent cute, but frankly it’s getting a little old now. Social media claims to have a real job with benefits, but when you ask where the job is, SM gets all cagey and secretive. You never volunteered to be someone’s sugar daddy (or mama). You had more self-respect than that. Show me the money, sweetheart, show me the money. Social media still looks incredible and always turns heads, but what exactly does SM do all day? Really?

As the prophet Yoda said, “Give up hope do not.” Things WILL get better if you work at it. You need to invest in your relationship with social media. Good, healthy relationships do not survive in a vaccum. They survive and flourish through learning and personal growth.

To that end, I invite you to attend the upcoming Mass Technology Council Social Media Summit at the awesome Microsoft NERD Center in Cambridge, MA on Thursday, June 3.

Register: http://masstlcsocialmediasummit2010.eventbrite.com.

This exciting summit will feature a keynote by David Weinberger, Senior Researcher at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, and multiple break-out sessions lead by experts and practitioners who will discuss, debate and explore hot topics in the industry including:

- Advanced listening
- Lead generation
- Social media “outside the box”
- Overcoming internal resistance to social media
- Social media in regulated industries

You and social media will leave the NERD Center together and walk along the Charles River on that sweet springtime afternoon. Perhaps a fine mist will hover over the water and you and social media will capture the memory in a photograph and share it with you friends around the world. You will leave the NERD Center that day with renewed feelings of love, trust and passion for social media. That sounds like a good investment to me.

Share on Facebook

Technorati Tags: Berkman Center, MassTLC, Social Media

Share/Save

Caroline Kennedy probably hasn’t done tons of media training because as someone who has lived her life in or near the media klieg lights, she has always valued her privacy. In fact she co-wrote a prescient, insightful book in 1995 about the topic with Ellen Alderman, “The Right to Privacy,” that is more relevant today than ever.

In the book, Kennedy and Alderman pointed out that the word “privacy” doesn’t appear in the Constitution and that no explicit right to privacy exists; and then go on to cite numerous examples of infringements of privacy – by legal means. They also warned of new threats to personal privacy that they correctly predicted would explode during the digital age.

“…[W]hat is far and away the biggest threat to privacy today, the one individuals are most powerless against … [is] the increased technical ability to gather and disseminate all kinds of personal information about each and every one of us. Both government and the private sector are exponentially increasing their ability to track, monitor, and profile us.”

Facebook is an example of a corporate entity that now seems to be threatening the privacy of individuals in this way. Once just a goofy network for college students to hook up and share pix with their friends, Facebook has morphed into an information octopus with a black box that is collecting and archiving data on hundreds of millions of people on a minute-by-minute basis. Judging from the digital Zeitgeist these days, the good will that has Facebook built over time as an innocent means to stay in touch with friends and family may be giving way to a general sense of suspicion and distrust.

Writing for Wired, Ryan Singel has go so far as to say that Facebook has gone “rogue” and is calling for an “open alternative:”

[I]n December, with the help of newly hired Beltway privacy experts, [Facebook] reneged on its privacy promises and made much of your profile information public by default. That includes the city that you live in, your name, your photo, the names of your friends and the causes you’ve signed onto.

This spring Facebook took that even further. All the items you list as things you like must become public and linked to public profile pages. If you don’t want them linked and made public, then you don’t get them — though Facebook nicely hangs onto them in its database in order to let advertisers target you.

This includes your music preferences, employment information, reading preferences, schools, etc. All the things that make up your profile … Simultaneously, the company began shipping your profile information off pre-emptively to Yelp, Pandora and Microsoft — so that if you show up there while already logged into Facebook, the sites can “personalize” your experience when you show up. You can try to opt out after the fact, but you’ll need a master’s in Facebook bureaucracy to stop it permanently.

Read More at http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/05/facebook-rogue.

I’m increasingly wary of Facebook and what it’s doing with my personal information — and am beginning to think that Facebook has jumped the shark — or at least lost its reputation as a harmless pastime. I’d be willing to pay for a similar service that promised to protect my privacy, or better yet, use a free, open source alternative. What about you? Are you still cool with being nude in public? Or is it time to get dressed?

Share on Facebook

Technorati Tags: Facebook, Marketing, privacy, Social Media, Social Networks

Share/Save

It has become nearly impossible to come up with a truly original idea these days, unless you have a PhD or some equivalent level of expertise and training in a niche area. Fortunately for us Jacks and Jills of all trades, there are an inifinite number of hybrid ideas – mashups of existing, time tested innovations and technologies – to keep us busy cooking up new stuff until the cows come home, which probably means never unless you live on a farm.

When it comes to media and promotion in general, nothing is older or time-tested than events listings. That’s probably because events listings are great content – they are timely, interesting, and offer practical information that people can really use. Events listings predate the printing press by thousands of years. In New England, ye olde Town Cryer made the rounds promoting upcoming events as far back as settements began. Go to The Boston Globe headquarters on Morrissey Boulevard in Boston and in the lobby you’ll see a wall-sized reproduction of a front page of The Globe from the late 1800′s that among other things promotes, what else, events.

Combine events listings with Twitter (itself a mashup of sms texting and blogging) and you get BostonTweetUp, which along with a Twitter stream at @BostonTweetUp and a weekly videocast includes a highly accessible Google calendar interface, which I include below for your convenience.

BostonTweet is run by social media marketing strategist Joselin Mane. Thank you Joselin! 

Posted via web from @timallik on Twitter

Share on Facebook

Share/Save

Share on Facebook

Technorati Tags: mobile marketing, PRWeek, public relations, Social Media, Topaz Partners

Share/Save

Share on Facebook

Technorati Tags: China Pearl, Social Media, Topaz Partners, Topaz Team, video

Share/Save

Alyssa Milano called it early in the day, while Mad TV gets the crystal ball award for coming up with the concept of iPad as a high-tech feminine hygiene product way back in 2007:

I think the name is OK and that people will likely become tired of the joke – if they ever laughed in the first place. If the iPad rocks as most Apple products seem to do these days, it’s not likely to matter much anyway.

Share on Facebook

Technorati Tags: Apple, Branding, humor, iPad, launches

Share/Save

We all have a good “reply to all” story to tell. I recall a friend at a Boston-based news outlet who, after going through a painful breakup, sent a heartfelt email to his former girlfriend — as well as the entire news staff. He darted desperately from computer to computer with arms flailing, trying as he might to get the Genie back into the bottle, but it was too late.

Because I blog here, yesterday I received a news pitch, via email, about a new book by someone who I respect.

I didn’t think much about the pitch until I began receiving “reply to all” messages from reporters and bloggers in various states of exasperation, asking to be taken off the mailing list. Some were polite, some were boiling mad. And as the flood of “reply to all” messages grew wider and deeper, so to did the cluelessness of the people who were, well, replying to all.

The irony was this: some of the very same people who were upset about receiving these “reply to all” messages ended up fueling the very problem that so infuriated them.

It’s sort of like complaining about someone who forgets to put a new role of toilet paper in the toilet paper dispenser … and then not replacing the toilet paper yourself.

I’ve received pitches from the PR firm in question in the past about various topics. They are usually very short and timely. This pitch was for a book that was interesting. Any reporter that can’t find time to read a short and timely email pitch should consider a job that requires less multitasking. I always try to personalize my pitches and don’t send out mass mailings, but in the end, information is information, isn’t it?

The big error here was not that the PR firm exposed the email list by not using the BCC field (a no-no that even my most elderly, late-adopting relatives now fully understand is a mistake). The big error was not responding quickly enough to the ensuing uproar. I kept looking for a defense, an explanation. An apology. Something from the the PR firm. Out of the office? A day at the beach, perhaps?

Here are my takeways. PR people, you are playing with fire when it comes to resorting to mass email blasts.

Reporters and bloggers, if you get a message from someone who has hit “reply to all” and it upsets you, don’t “reply to all” in response. Make sense?

Share on Facebook

Share/Save