The Intersection of Online and Offline

There has been so much flying back and forth over the blogosphere over the last couple of weeks about bad pitches for bloggers, I don’t really have a lot to add.

I think that it’s a little ironic, however, that the “traditional media” got over this a long time ago, and for the most part, just ignore bad pitches.  I have pitched and I have been pitched.  Bad pitches happen.  I think it is a little our of bounds, however, to call people out in a public setting.  Most bad pitches that I have encountered have resulted either from an incredibly junior (read: inexperienced) doing the pitching, or an PR agency employee who is being pushed either by the agency or the client.  This past semester, one of my graduate students even told me that he was lambasted by the owner of the boutique firm for which he worked because he could not get his client in the Wall Street Journal.  There is a lot of pressure out there for earned media.

I really liked Jason’s Falls’ take on pitching bloggers.  He interviewed Allison Blass of MWW, but really did his homework before interviewing her, noting that, in addition to her job responsibilities, she has had her own blog since 2005.

Nice, balanced and well-researched post, Jason.

Mark

I wrote a more blown out column that was printed today in Media Bullseye about how many organizations are missing the boat on online reputation management. It’s more detailed than what I blogged about last week and will be the beginning of what I hope will be a three or four-part series about how to do it right.

Article is here.

Mark

As I first heard about in the “Hobson and Holtz” podcast and later read about in the International Herald Tribune, a German version of encyclopedias are going from offline to online and back to offline. At the center of the effort is Wikipedia.

The Herald Tribune notes that:

“In Germany, a printed collection of Wikipedia articles is being produced for the first time by a major publisher, Bertelsmann. The idea is to use Wikipedia to capture the zeitgeist by selecting the most popular entries, Beate Varnhorn, the editor in charge of Bertelsmann’s reference works, said in an interview by telephone. “We think of it as an encyclopedic yearbook,” Varnhorn said, leaving open the possibility of new editions if the 2008 version is successful.”

When I read this, I had a flashback to my childhood and the encyclopedia salespeople (one of whom reminded me of the “Old Gil” character in “The Simpsons”) telling parents that for a small fortune, purchasing a set of encyclopedias was “making an investment in your child’s future.” So parents either shelled out cold, hard cash or (and I am really sounding old), S&H Green Stamps.

Leaving aside the whole notion of fact-checking (and who is right and who is wrong, plus who will be doing the fact-checking), it’s fascinating that Wikipedia has reached such status in the online world that, as an encyclopedia, it is going back to its roots as a print edition.

I can’t say that I have ever really presented to understand the Germans, but the most recent Internet access statistics by Nielsen Net Ratings (old - from 2003) stated that 63 percent of all Germans had Internet access. One can only assume that this has risen in the time period since. So why offline? There has to be a business case for it.

I think that this will be an interesting exercise, but a lot of questions will persist - mainly, what is the benefit to producing static information from a source whose main reason for being is its ability to be updated instantaneously, maintained, and ultimately, produced a balanced outcome?

I’m not sure, but it will make for some interesting reading.

Auf Wiedersehen,

Mark

One of the smartest people out there is Kami Watson Huyse, someone whom I follow through the “For Immediate Release” Six Degrees of Separation. BTW - the “For Immediate Release “Hobson and Holtz” podcasts are the best out there — bar none.

Since many of us struggle to make the case of how social media can add to the bottom line, I thought that I would post a PowerPoint presentation that Kami and Geoff Livingston gave at the New Comm Forum 2008.

The deck is below and, although it lacks the running commentary which I’m sure adds a lot, makes a tremendous business case for social media - something that many of us struggle to do.

| View | Upload your own

Mark

Business Week’s recent article, “Do Reputation Management Services Work?” creates many more questions in mind mind than it solves. There is a lot that is missing from this article.

I get that Business Week is a business publication and one that does not necessarily focus on technology, but there is a lot that they either gloss over and get wrong. I’ll be post a TON more on online reputation management in coming days, but one of the disturbing sentences is:

Most reputation services work by tracking what written about a client on a site, then doing search engine optimization.”

To me, this is the epitome of oversimplification. The article presents a “Google problem,” not a “reputational problem.” What about gauging the reach and impact of the source that offers a positive or negative opinion on your brand or your issue? What about, if the mention is bad, developing a methodology for response? When do you “go nuclear?” When do you engage third-parties? And how do you do it all in a transparent fashion, not screwing it up like Edelman and Wal*Mart did?

These are some of the questions that I plan to blog about beginning this weekend. The good news is that online reputation management is something that is reaching the mainstream conciousness of the business world. The bad news, in my humble opinion, can be summed up by the following words in the article:

ReputationDefender, a two-year-old Menlo Park (Calif.) company that mainly markets to individuals, plans to introduce a service for companies that would cost a one-time fee of a few hundred dollars, according to founder Michael Fertik.

<Shudder>.

More to come.

Mark