Agency blogs are like sewers—what you get out of them depends on what you put into them

(Apologies to Tom Lehrer for that headline.)

I follow so many blogs from PR, marketing and advertising agencies that I was taken aback when the headline Agencies Ditch Blogs cross my feeds. The Digiday post by staff writer Jack Marshall suggests that agencies “are increasingly turning their backs on blogs in favor of platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and newer kids on the block like Instagram and Facebook.”

A lot of agencies do maintain blogs, Marshall observes, but largely so they can shine a spotlight on themselves when they win awards, make a noteworthy hire or issue a press release. But because blogs don’t contribute to… Read More »

Altimeter Group proves the embargo is alive and well, when done right

To hear some tell it, the press embargo is dead.

It’s not, of course. I’ve written before that the embargo, when executed correctly, is a respected and useful tool. It thrives outside of the technology world. In medicine, where major journals publish comprehensive studies, embargoes are routine.

The key requirement for an effective embargo is an agreement between the news outlet and the news provider. I routinely get emails from PR agencies containing a press release along with an embargo restriction. I am under no obligation to honor that embargo, since I didn’t agree to it in the first place. I’ve never published any of this… Read More »

Keep dating your blog posts; it adds important context

The tweet that crossed my stream the other day expressed outrage. I followed the link and was pretty outraged myself, and said so in my own tweet. It didn’t take long before someone pointed out that the post was from 2006.

I have to admit I didn’t look at the date on the post. The assumption that if somebody else tweeted it, they had already assessed its timeliness is actually fairly common. NPR’s “On the Media” reported a few months back about a story that was widely covered by the mainstream press even though it wasn’t true. The news outlet that first reported the story had done a shoddy job of verifying the facts, but that… Read More »

Eight tips for getting employees to comment on CEO intranet blogs

Whenever I raise the issue of leader blogs on intranets, the same issue inevitably arises, as it did during a workshop I conducted a week or so ago on social intranets and again at an intranet conference in New York earlier this week. It goes like this:

My CEO/president/senior executive is blogging on the intranet but employees aren’t leaving any comments. He/she posted a really important/interesting item but got only two/four/six comments. He/she is thinking that it’s not worth the effort if nobody’s going to comment.

While I can’t speak to each individual company or post, I can make some general recommendations about how to get… Read More »

FIR Interview: Dell Chief Blogger Lionel Menchaca

We first spoke with Dell’s chief blogger, Lionel Menchaca, in an FIR interview on January 12, 2007, not too long after Dell’s first blog was launched. We spoke with Lionel again to find out how the blog and the company’s overall social media approach has evolved in the intervening 4-1/2 years. The interview was conducted using a Google+ Hangout. An audio version is available.

Get this podcast:

• Download the MP4 (video) file (106Mb, 37:51)
• Download the MP3 (audio) file (15.7Mb, 39:11)
• Get the show on iTunes
• Subscribe to the FIR Interviews RSS feed
• Get the FIR app for your iPhone and for your Android device (visit the Android Market… Read More »

FIR Interview: Jonny Bentwood on Tweetlevel and Bloglevel

Identifying who are influential voices online is fast becoming an art if not a science. More technology tools and services are coming to market that help communicators identify people with high influencer rankings - typically, the types of people who create original ideas that are amplified by others, and those who engage most meaningfully with their followers.

In this FIR Interview, Neville Hobson, talks with Jonny Bentwood at Edelman London about BlogLevel and version 2.0 of TweetLevel, free tools that allow communicators to identify who is influential on a particular topic, on a designated platform. Dubbed by Edelman as "a GPS for… Read More »

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