October 2006

Nooo…not Auburn’s ranking this week…although nice job over Florida!

Nooo…not whether or not Larry Coker should be suspended for the latest example of felonious behavior at Miami U?

How about Edelman and their handling of the Walmart BloggerGate? Ding…ding…ding!

This one is worth examining because of all of the juicy angles…the esteemed PR bloggers involved…the silence of the agency amidst the roar from the blogosphere…and the eventual agony and mea culpa of the CEO. Better than day-time television boys and girls and played out live right before your PR blog-reading eyes!

This speaks to the excitement and to the danger of the Internet for corporations. Here is an agency that touts itself as one that “gets it.” Clearly with the talent they’ve attracted in the last year or so…Steve Rubel…Phil Gomes, etc. that have purported to bring their “social media expertise” into a big agency environment, Edelman should have known better. Or maybe it really is their path to forge. If someone is going to lead, they’re going to screw it up…precisely because they’re taking the risk of leadership.

It’s worth examining. I’m guilty of pointing my finger and saying, “see how badly you screwed up?” And they did…mostly by their silence when it all went wrong, they reverted back to a very old school CYA attitude. But they didn’t screw up by trying the campaign in the first place. That took guts and it took a client with some imagination.

What do you think? Take the time to read through these posts and discuss it if you can, because it is the environment that you young evangelists are walking into.

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Thought I’d jump into the fray here. We’re going to create marcom memes. A meme is something repeated from one mind to another, or from one site (blog) to another. Think longtail. Think WOM - word of mouth.

Let’s discuss new tools that we might incorporate into an online campaign for a client. Creating interest in a topic, or site, may be accomplished using a number of tactics. What I’d like for us to discuss here is the use of digg-style sites and applications. 3spots has assembled a list of “over 300 Digg like applications! (exactly 349 now) without counting the +200 Social Bookmarks! (del.icio.us, RawSugar, Netvouz…)” types of sites.

If you are not familiar with digg, here is their description of what the site accomplishes.

Digg is all about user powered content. Every article on digg is submitted and voted on by the digg community. Share, discover, bookmark, and promote the news that’s important to you!

An older such community is Slashdot. It was founded in 1997 and has become quite legendary. These sites - digg, slashdot, et.al - can literally make a site popular in a click of the mouse - or mice, as in thousands (or millions) of them. To have your site “dugg” or “slashdotted” can bring you wild exposure online. There are numerous true tales of stories being published on these sites and driving so much traffic to the site - the servers crash. People whose sites have been slashdotted or dugg, in this manner, are proud of it. They brag about it.

So, we are talking about a community organized around a topic of interest where discussions ensue and the stories are peer reviewed by the community’s members. Is this really that much different from you writing about someone and linking to them in your blogs or Facebook account? No, it is just done differently.

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