I spoke to two classes of communications majors today about digital PR and social media marketing. It was a wonderful experience. The University of Maryland undergraduate course was called Comm350:  Public Relations Theory and their communications professor, Sahar Mohamed Khamis, was amazing generous and welcoming, basically handing me the reins to her class, sight unseen.  The class is described as:

The historical development and contemporary status of public relations in business, government, associations and other organizations. Application of communication theory and social science methods to the research, planning, communication and evaluation aspects of the public relations process.

Everybody was super bright and super nice to me. One thing I was concerned about is that in both classes I taught today, both Comm350, only a couple people had Twitter accounts and I think there were just a couple folks who have a blog or who had every blogged.  And these are our future PR professionals.  Of course, when I asked, 100%  of the students in both classes were on Facebook.  Natch.

Well, I presented my A Guide to Blogger Relations slide show and then took questions.  I told them that blogging, Twittering, and participating in the wider conversation would almost guarantee them a good job at a local or national agency after college.  I told them that they should all, separately or in concert, start writing a blog about their take on communication, on advertising, on popular culture, on television, on PR, on social media — that the thing they learn in class every day would be interesting to the blogosphere, seen through their young eyes.  That there is no doubt in my mind that you can really and truly write yourself into the job of your dreams and if they didn’t blog, all of them, they were darned fools (well, maybe I didn’t say it — it was implied).

I receive quite a thank you note from one of student from the first class, Miss Chelsea Clark, who not only asked a question but also said the following nice things — a mixture of review, testimonial, and, I dare say, her first blog post once removed:

I walked into my Comm350 class on Tuesday expecting to sit there taking notes for an hour and a half like usual. Instead, our professor announced we were  having a guest speaker. I was thinking to myself that this could go one of two  ways: really interesting and way better than cramping my hand taking notes, or  really boring and put me to sleep.

Our guest speaker took the floor and introduced himself and described what his company does. I’ve learned about blogs in PR before, but I was never really able  to link the two together. Yeah, so blogs are a new media outlet, but how does  that help clients? How do businesses personally benefit from random people  around the country writing about their hobbies and interests? I never really  understood the connection until Chris’ presentation.

He described how he would have his team search for blogs that were written about topics that relate to his clients and then send out mass emails to the  bloggers to ask them to write about his clients. He was worried that we would  think he was a spammer, but, having made many annoying calls and emails to  reporters myself, I knew how he felt. He then showed us results of actual  bloggers that wrote about his clients. He got so excited! We all recognized this  feeling, for being PR people ourselves, we know how satisfying it is to have free  publicity.

I thought that Chris did a really good job with his presentation. I followed what he was saying the whole time and enjoyed some of his nerdy antics. I think  some of the people in the class were less interested or maybe didn’t follow what   Chris’ company is responsible for, either because they were pretending to take  notes while really checking their facebooks or because they are still a bit  unfamiliar with PR and got a little bit confused.

For me, the presentation was enlightening, exciting, and interesting and showed me new ways of getting publicity without necessarily resorting to TV and  newspapers. I would definitely recommend him to other PR college classes that  are looking for guest speakers!

That, Chelsea, really made my month.  I appreciate the kind words and thank you, again, to professor Sahar Khamis

who will soon be coming out with a really compelling new book you should all pre-order on Amazon,  Islam Dot Com: Contemporary Islamic Discourses in Cyberspace.  I look forward to it.

Also, if you’re curious as to the content of the slide show and the presentation I did, here it is inline for your enjoyment… however, I need to record one with my insight, wit, and wisdom one of these days soon:

I spent nearly three-years living the life if an “NMSer.” It is where I got trained up in the art of new media strategy and new media marketing. I had an amazing experience working there and I am also happy to share the latest post-Meredith purchase in the form of a very nice article, Tracking Who’s Saying What About Whom: New Media Strategies’ ‘Online Analysts’ Scour the Web for Mentions of Opinion-Sensitive Clients, by Kim Hart, on the Washington Post. Simply put, co-founders Pete Snyder and Aaron Earls are truly visionaries, deserving of their notable success.

Tracking Who’s Saying What About WhomNew Media Strategies’ ‘Online Analysts’ Scour the Web for Mentions of Opinion-Sensitive Clients

By Kim Hart

Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, January 29, 2007; Page D01

Moira Curran starts her day at the office by skimming several dozen blogs, occasionally firing off instant messages to her co-workers with links to juicy bits of celebrity gossip.

Then she listens to podcasters chatting about the latest episodes of “Grey’s Anatomy” or “Lost.” In the afternoon, she keeps an eye on soap operas on the television set that hangs above her desk.

Ashley Duncan, left, Carrie O’Malley, center, and Jenni Collins are among the New Media Strategies employees who comb the Web for clients that want to protect their brands and public images. (By Ricky Carioti — The Washington Post)

About 70 colleagues, scattered across two floors of an Arlington high-rise, spend eight hours a day doing much of the same. Some of them are also playing video games, watching movies and cruising around MySpace.

That’s exactly what the clients of New Media Strategies, an online marketing company, pay the employees to do. Companies ranging from movie studios and television networks to automakers and burger chains hire these professional Web surfers to scour the Internet for any mention of their brands. Over the past few years, the “online analysts” have helped the companies track their reputations, found ways to get their products noticed and joined online conversations to help steer them the way clients want them to go.

More recently, as the explosion of blogs, social networks and video-sharing sites has driven big companies to recognize the role of Internet image in protecting their bottom lines, traditional media companies and private investors are seeking to buy Web-savvy start-ups that have a toehold in cyberspace.

That’s what happened to New Media Strategies this month, when it was acquired — with two Los Angeles-based online marketing firms — by Meredith Corp., a Des Moines-based media company known for its sturdy lineup of traditional magazines such as Better Homes and Gardens and Ladies’ Home Journal.

“I see the Internet as the world’s largest focus group,” said Pete Snyder, a former media consultant and political pollster who started the company out of his Capitol Hill apartment eight years ago. He had received a few casual offers to buy the company, but interest spiked in the past year. “So many companies have been so deeply entrenched in old media. . . . Now they’re looking to plow into the Web 2.0 world.”

Evidence of that world abounds in the Arlington office, brightly painted in red, orange and yellow. A podcast studio occupies a corner office, and conference rooms are named “.com,” “.net,” “.gov” and “.org.”

Posters from the movies the company has helped promote line the walls — so many that passersby sometimes ask if the office doubles as a theater. Framed albums from Black Sabbath and several seasons of “American Idol” hang next to a flat-screen television reserved for “product viewing.”

Many of the online analysts wear headphones all day and chat with bloggers via instant messages. Their job is to be the clients’ eyes and ears online, said Clay Dunn, 28, a brand manager who monitors what is said about video games and movies.

He watches for rumors and alerts his Hollywood clients if online coverage goes awry. Once, for example, backstage photos from a movie set surfaced and spoiled a sneak preview already in the works.

Curran, another brand manager who trolls the Web on behalf of television clients, corrects errors published in blogs. If rumors spread that someone’s been fired from the cast of HBO’s “Entourage,” for example, she’s there to set the record straight. If an angry viewer bashes a network for a violent scene in a prime-time show, she’s there to post a rebuttal. She watches soap operas so she’ll be able to chat knowledgably with the rest of the online audience.

“Every day, I’m an absolute sponge,” said Curran, 25.

Curran said she is careful to acknowledge her connection to clients when it’s required. All online marketers have to walk a fine line when they work the blogosphere. Federal Trade Commission rules require them to identify their roles when they’re making a point on behalf of a client, but if they’re gossiping about the latest episode of “Desperate Housewives” they can legally be as anonymous as anyone else.

Ashley Duncan, left, Carrie O’Malley, center, and Jenni Collins are among the New Media Strategies employees who comb the Web for clients that want to protect their brands and public images. (By Ricky Carioti — The Washington Post)

The New Media Strategies employees are young, self-identified tech geeks whose goal is to know the Internet inside and out — an increasingly daunting task as hundreds of new blogs and Web sites crop up every day. They try to stay a few strides ahead of online developments — or at least only a step or two behind.

“The Internet used to be our oyster,” Curran said of the days just a few years ago when there were only chat rooms and message boards to monitor. “It still is, but we have to reassess the things we pay the most attention to.”

New Media Strategies’ entertainment practice was the first to take off; Hollywood has long been willing to spend money to influence the online world. Over the past few years, Coca-Cola, Burger King, AT&T, Dodge and Ford joined the client roster. Most recently, public affairs has become the fastest-growing area for the company.

“Before, we could barely get a politician to spend money on a Web site, let alone a massive Web campaign,” Snyder said from his Arlington office. “The world across the river is waking up to this.”

So are buyers and investors. Media companies are starting to show strong interest in adding interactive firms to their portfolios, said Seth R. Alpert, managing director of AdMedia Partners, a New York investment bank that facilitates deals between advertising and marketing companies. AdMedia represented New Media Strategies in its recent acquisition.

“Serving advertisers is now seen as being more broad than putting ink on paper or building Web sites,” Alpert said.

British marketing giant WPP Group, which includes established advertising firms Ogilvy & Mather and Young & Rubicam, has acquired several interactive-media firms. Nielsen Media Research combined three online-research companies to create Nielsen BuzzMetrics, which analyzes online markets.

In the Washington area, private investors recently put money into another start-up — Clarabridge, a Reston company whose software crawls Web sites, recording what people say about specific products or brands and tabulating the occurrence of positive or negative words to help clients assess their cyberspace images. For example, it tracks recommendations and criticisms about certain airlines on travel sites.

The company calls the process “online intelligence.” It is currently working for pharmaceutical companies to get a sense of how consumers feel about the drugs the clients make.

“This can shape how they spend that million dollars to launch a product,” said Sid Banerjee, co-founder and chief executive of Clarabridge. “There are enough mainstream consumers making decisions on the Internet that they represent a meaningful sample of the market.”

Last week, the company took in $7.2 million in venture capital funding from Intersouth Partners, based in Durham, N.C., and Reston, bringing its total financing to $10 million since it started in 2005.

Cymfony, a Boston interactive-media firm and a competitor of New Media Strategies and Clarabridge, has received $24 million in venture capital cash in the past seven years.

Cymfony got its start doing research for intelligence agencies but decided to use its text-mining software to monitor the consumer-generated Web. Its business has doubled as advertisers take to the Internet, said chief executive Andrew Bernstein.

“There’s too much media online and no one knows where to turn,” he said. “So they turn to us.”

“Pete Snyder, Founder and CEO, New Media Strategies, Inc.: Pete is the Founder and CEO of New Media Strategies, the industry pioneer and market leader in online intelligence, brand promotion and brand protection, headquartered in Arlington, Virginia. Drawing on his background as a pollster and media consultant, Pete founded New Media Strategies in 1999, establishing a new industry in market research, brand marketing and communications. New Media Strategies uses technology to tap into the power of the Internet and the blogosphere, helping leading corporations and causes, including some of the biggest Hollywood brands, to promote and protect their brands and bottom lines, online. As CEO, Pete has guided New Media Strategies’ success and rapid organic growth. Over the past six years, New Media Strategies has built a blue-chip client base that features some of the best known brands and corporations in the world, including among others: ABC, AOL Time Warner, Atari, Boston Beer Company, Burger King Corporation, Dodge, Disney, EA, Elektra Records, HBO, Levi’s, McDonald’s, Monster, Northwest Airlines, Paramount Pictures, RCA Records, Red Bull, Reebok, Revlon, Sci-Fi Channel, Sony, USA Network, and Wyeth. Pete was recently honored as a finalist for the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year awards, and New Media Strategies was recently recognized on the “Inc. 500″ listing of the Fastest Growing Companies in America. Proving that a company can focus on fast growth, profitability, and fun, New Media Strategies has been recognized by Washingtonian Magazine as one of “50 Great Places to Work” in Washington, and the Washington Business Journal recently honored New Media Strategies as one of Washington’s Best Places to Work. A former political media consultant and a pollster to New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, Pete regularly appears as a commentator on the Fox News Channel and has served as a marketing and political expert on CNBC, The News with Brian Williams, CBS Evening News with Dan Rather, and Fox News Channel’s Your World with Neil Cavuto, Hannity and Colmes and Fox and Friends. New Media Strategies has appeared in national media publications including the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post and the Hollywood Reporter.”

I hope that the following article is a good first step towards deciding if blogging is the best investment of your time, energy, resources, and message.

I have been participating in online virtual communities since I bought my first 300 baud modem back in 1983 and logged into my first Honolulu BBS. In the last 22-years, I have been a member of many different virtual communities, including discussion forums, USENET newsgroups, Wikis, and of course blogs. There are some important things to consider before you decide to use blogging — or any sort of online communication — as a way to convey your company’s brand and message.

Effective PR Blogging

How to develop an effective public relations (PR) blog strategy for your company or organization.

For-profit companies and the modern incarnation of the traditional University have a lot in common. Universities have been using viral, buzz, and word-of-mouth marketing for years: their students, their professors, and especially their alumni networks. It is little wonder why MIT and Yale offer future Presidents lifetime free email addresses in the form of alum.mit.edu, and aya.yale.edu — because when smart people share valuable information, people want to know where that person went and where that person works.

It is very likely that your business can benefit in a similar fashion by setting the best and brightest in your company free to create goodwill for your firm and spread your name in the community. If properly utilized, these ambassadors can have a significant impact on the image and standing of your company, so they should be carefully chosen, loyal, invested team players. At present, the best tool for this job is the weblog, better known as “blogs”. In the article below, I will try to give an overview of the use and impact of blogs, and to provide a history and contextualization of blogs, so you can better decide if and how you would like to implement this powerful tool.

Years ago, I served as Managing Director of beehive North America, a software company that developed web applications using a Python-based programming platform called Zope. In order to see where interest lay, I started the Zope Python User Group (ZPUG) and a personal blog that featured my day-to-day while also being the only place where photos, information, and meeting minutes for the User Group could be found. I quickly realized that it is possible to shamelessly promote yourself, your wares, your company, and your services if you are perceived as giving way more than you get.

In my case, I used my personal blog to cover monthly ZPUG meetings, how my travels to Germany to visit my parent company went, and how cool it was to train Zope to the gang at Pfizer, Johns Hopkins, and the Nature Conservancy. I talked about working on new e-Books and developing new components for our Enterprise-level content management suite of applications that we were developing for major Berlin banks.

Since it wasn’t a corporate blog proper and served as my personal home page, I could easily discuss everything that was happening to me, including recipes, pet stories, travel experiences, and lots and lots of work. Since I spent over half my waking hours working, I spent a lot of time blogging about beehive NA, its parent company beehive GmbH, ZPUG, and Zope and Python in general. And since the software is Open Source and constantly evolving and maturing, my blog became a valuable resource to find more Zope answers, Zope help, Zope information, Zope training, and Zope developers. And that trainer and that developer would usually be beehive NA or beehive GmbH.

Like I said before, Universities have been doing this kind of viral and buzz marketing for centuries. And since Universities openly and readily share their scholarship, no matter how shameless the pomp of their titles, they and their hallowed Academies most certainly offer back much more than they are perceived as taking. And yet they are not paupers. Universities control endowments in the billions of dollars and command princely sums for the privilege of study. This is a shrewd business in which prestige, altruism, collaboration, brain trust, and purity of thought result in a self-promotional carte blanche that only finds its equal in organized religion. There is nothing even close in the commercial world.

Most of the early tech companies and early adopters of the Internet circa 1992 were former academics. The first thing these academics did when they moved from the Ivory Tower to a suite of offices was to get back into the USENET newsgroups they frequented during their research days. In truth the only notable difference in their discourse was in the signature file at the end of every posting. Instead of an .EDU address, the posters transitioned their emails to .COM. These were the pre-SPAM days when it was okay to have your plain text email address in a public posting. Everybody had their real email in their revealing signature at the bottom of every posting. This signature said a lot about you. It lent legitimacy to your words and allowed you to be the expert. If your media.mit.edu email address worked, then you were in fact who you said you were.

There isn’t a better form of word of mouth marketing than having the name of your company associated with brilliance. Universities have known this for years and it has become institutionalized in the axiom, publish or perish. Whether a professional journal, a conference, academic paper, the essay, or in postings on USENET, the reputation of an academic and the academy can hinge on the prestige associated with good PR. And in the academic environment, content is king.

USENET used to be exclusive and it wasn’t until well into the 90s when gateways opened up to AOL and other ISPs to USENET, followed closely by spammer, spiders, and bots. Forced into exile by bozos, baiters, flamers, and newbies, USENET became Balkanized. A brain drain into more exclusive communities ensued. One of the earliest homes for the alpha male techie was Slashdot, which launched in 1997 and is a prototype for the modern blog with Dave Winer’s Scripting News being one of the earliest. Both of these sites were highly technical with strong academic influences.

Until 1999, one might find some important vestige of USENET in a personal web site or in a Frequently Asked Question (FAQ) but these were publications and not open for debate and collaboration in the same culture of open sharing found in the Newsgroups. In the late 90s, web logging (blogging) became a viable option for savvy users and early adopters. Blogs allowed easy daily postings and associated threaded discussions and XML-based Really Simple Syndication (RSS).

Blogging articles – whether personal, technical, or professional – with the ability to accept reader comments and be able to track visitors has become a major force in the media in the last few years, arguably influencing the 2004 U.S. Presidential election. Not only were people interesting in learning what other people were thinking real time, but people were eager to talk back and get involved in dynamic debates over issues as they happened.

RSS has become very simple and widely adopted in recent years. The reading of online content via RSS client software allows online readers to dispense with their Favorites and Bookmarks and read online news, journalism, journaling, papers, search engines, and magazines in the same way we now read email.

Most consumers ignore corporate sites as sales pitch and propaganda. Not so if you allow your employees to speak for you. Talk not only about the cool new project and hot new services, but everything else. If you hire smart, if you trust your employees, if you walk the talk, then there is nothing to worry about. And people really enjoy listening to employees discuss their day-to-day. Consumers want to know your company’s eye color and they only way they’ll find out is by getting to your you through your employees.

It is similar to visiting campus before applying to college. You want to stop a couple students (or talk to a couple alumni) and ask them about their experience. People love gossip and people adore getting the inside scoop because everybody likes dirty laundry and everybody loves being let in on a secret. What this comes down to is that people demand to be entertained and nothing gives back more than feeling like an insider.

If I were to recommend blog-building to a .COM enterprise, it would have to be at this level: invite your brightest to blog just outside the umbrella of the company with your blessing. There are some important ground rules: the employee needs to feel comfortable and not micromanaged otherwise the blog will not be perceived as honest. People can tell when their being duped; additionally, it is essential that there is trust there on both sides; finally, it is important to find the employee who really wants to do this, otherwise the blog will fall to disrepair.

It takes such a leap of faith to convince the corporate lawyers to loosen their grip on blogging employees. And, as the number of bloggers who get canned by their employer for blogging, increases, people are going to become more covert about it. They go underground. They are blogging already anyway. Why not allow them to blog fully, blog freely, and share with the rest of the world the proud fact they spend half of all their waking hours working for you, your company, and fulfilling your vision?

©2004 Christopher James Abraham