MS&L Blogworks: Corporate Blogs Made Easy

February 03, 2010

Kondek Speaks

By Charlie Kondek
Director, New Media Relations

I was absolutely thrilled to be profiled at Bulldog Reporter. I got to sound off on a lot of things dear to me, not just our business but the future of our industry. For example:

Q: What do you make of the whole "who owns digital" debate?

"Owning digital" is probably the wrong way to put it. I'd say in general PR should own social media and advertising should own online advertising and content creation. But, of course, these distinctions are blurring. Honestly, while the lines between PR and advertising are fuzzy, operationally there are still some very big distinctions between the disciplines that make the separations reasonable and determine that PR, in fact, should own digital. PR is the discipline of participation in media, and that's exactly what digital or social media is—participation-based. Advertising is the discipline of disruptive media—and I'm not saying it's a bad thing at all; the best advertising is a welcome disruption. But in general, these demarcations are pretty fair; advertising builds the cool site, PR extends it into social media.

Those hard, fast lines are really malleable, though. Some ad agencies do great "outreach" into social media and some PR firms (like my own) build great content. Expect this to be a constant adjustment in the years to come. In the short term, it's clear the best brands get their agencies working together for the best possible mix.

Posted by staff on February 3, 2010 03:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
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January 27, 2010

Facebook Metrics Businesses Have Been Longing For

By Eden Litt
Web Project Manager

Last week, Facebook released a new feature for fan page administrators that will greatly benefit our clients. Authenticated pages with at least 10,000 fans will now feature two new metrics under status updates: Raw Impressions and Feedback Rate.

But what do they mean?

Raw Impressions indicate the number of times a post has “rendered.” In other words, every time the post is displayed on the page’s wall, in a fan’s live or news feed, or in a Facebook widget, it counts as an impression.
Feedback Rate calculates the number of comments and likes received on a post per impression. The formula equates to (Comments + Likes)/Impressions.

In addition to gathering more numbers on fans, these metrics will allow admins to better gauge their fans’ interactions with posts. This will allow us to better target content and timing of posts. While there are many more metrics we’re still dying to know, Facebook is taking baby steps in becoming more hospitable to the business world.

Posted by staff on January 27, 2010 02:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
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January 21, 2010

Changes to HelpAReporter.com Reflect E-mail Harvesting

If you're like me and my team of social media relations specialist, you subscribe to Peter Shankman's newsletter, Help A Reporter Out. Three times a business day, without fail, you get list of several queries from writers, freelancers, journalists and bloggers working on stories to which you and your clients may be able to contribute. But if you've perused your Shankmans lately you'll have noticed a change. No longer does the query, which gives subject, need and deadline, list the writer's e-mail address. Rather, it's a coded e-mail that goes into a new hub and relays the message to the writer. So for example, queries that used to appear with the e-mail "foodblogger@suchandsuch.com" will now appear as "queryxxy@helpareporter.com."

Why the change? You guessed it: too many writers were getting irrelevant e-mails from PR and marketing people like us. I had a chance to ask Shankman about it, and he said in an e-mail, "Too many people harvesting e-mails, too many people adding to lists, too many people spamming and not playing nice. We didn't have a choice." Shankman has always been explicit about how to use Help a Reporter Out, so this is no surprise. But it is a shame it had to come to this; I have made numerous valuable friendlies from the newsletter and will continue to endeavor to do so within the new rules. As Shankman might say, play nice!

What does this mean for PR people like me? You have to be quicker in responding to these queries, you can't let them pile up and then go through them all at once. The coded e-mails used in the newsletter are only live until the deadline set by the writer. In other words, if a writer tells you he is working on a story and his deadline is 5:00 P.M. EST, at 5:01 the e-mail queryxxy@helpareporter.com will go dead.

Posted by staff on January 21, 2010 10:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
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January 08, 2010

It's OK to Be Anti-Social

By Nichole Mrasek
Account Supervisor

Feeling socially overwhelmed online? From Facebook to LinkedIn, there is a social network ready to connect you to friends, old schoolmates, boyfriends/girlfriends and family. A new social networking site, By/Association, unclutters the news feed noise and caters to people with specific networking needs.

The site touts itself as exclusive and inherently important. From the company’s Web site: “By/Association is a community of remarkable individuals, hand-selected to seed inspiring and unexpected introductions.”

The site offers exclusivity by requiring that members join through an application process. And don’t worry about finding a good profile picture. The New York Times reports that the network doesn’t allow searching for people or pictures. This is because the site has one main purpose: networking. Its mission is to offer a place where people can connect and share ideas, philosophies and enrich projects they are working on, and, ultimately, their lives,

“The site covers London, Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York, with plans to expand to Toronto and Chicago by the end of the year,” according to the Times.

The site is definitely off to a clean start. But will it eventually evolve, as other online platforms have, and open its policies to meet the demands that its network will eventually create?

Read the full feature for more details and an interview with the site’s founder, The Anti-Social-Network Social Network.

Posted by staff on January 8, 2010 01:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
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June 03, 2009

BlogHer Earns More Funding, Continues Growth

By Alicia Dorset

Proving that BlogHer is the force to be reckoned with when it comes to women and blogging, the site has received an additional $7 million in funding, according to a recent post by Kara Swisher of All Things Digital.

Swisher reports that BlogHer now employs 30 people and the network itself reaches more than 14 million unique visitors a month.

If you haven’t had the chance to read some of the great content on BlogHer’s site or attend one of their conferences, make sure to spend some time at their web site. You can read the entire All Things Digital report here.

Posted by staff on June 3, 2009 09:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
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June 02, 2009

Yet Another Tool for IMing, Emailing, etc…

By Andrea MacLean

Google wants to change the way people communicate online by blending instant messaging, e-mail and document collaboration into a new service, called Wave. The free service will eliminate the need to use multiple tools to communicate online, according to Google execs, and will be available to the public later this year.

Software developers are being encouraged to create features that are compatible with Wave and web site owners or bloggers will be able to incorporate Wave’s messaging features as a bulletin board, for example.

Pretty cool, although we will have to wait and see whether consumers will be willing to leave behind their current e-mail, IM, etc and ride the Google Wave. Is there anything Google can’t do? Sigh.

Posted by staff on June 2, 2009 02:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
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May 27, 2009

The Post-Processing Technique

By Lyndsay Hoban

Groundswell author Josh Bernoff gave the keynote speech at the IAB Marketplace: Social Media last Monday, emphasizing the need to look at social media as a long-term trend.

Bernoff outlined the Groundswell P-O-S-T process (People, Objectives, Strategy, Technology) and highlighted successful examples of P-O-S-T in practice, including Tampax’s BeingGirl community and Hershey’s use of Houseparty.com for the launch of the Bliss line of chocolates.

He concluded his address with a focus on measurement, stating that successful use of social media must have meaningful metrics and clear objectives. “When it comes to social media, people really need to hear this,” he said.

Read his measuring sticks and the full article here.

Posted by staff on May 27, 2009 01:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
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