Off again

This time to Reno, NV to speak in front of the PRSA Sierra Nevada Chapter tomorrow.  I’m part of an all-day professional development conference.  I’m listed on the program as “How To Screw Up a Speaking Engagement” so I don’t know if I should be worried.  Anyway, more later as I fit it in.

Missing the boat on blogs

Mike Manuel is continuing the conversation about companies making a big mistake by not paying attention to what those on blogs are saying about their brands, products, services, or even executives on a regular basis. Obviously, a big part of this problem is education, insofar as:

• Companies don’t necessarily know this is going on
• Once a PR or marketing person does find out about what is happening on blogs, where does s/he begin to monitor, measure, or respond?
• What constitutes a response – a new blog, responses to each and every comment, contacting the blogger in question?

Additionally, most marketing and PR folks believe that they can eradicate difficulties on blogs and forums. It should be made pretty clear that mitigation is more likely to happen. Putting all the facts out there and clarifying whatever the problem or difficulty was in the first place, from another perspective, could prove as a final solution – but most bloggers won’t delete posts or comments that aren’t defamatory or libelous. At the very least, a company recognizing that there is a problem and making the effort to reach out to those involved, or at the least the blogger managing the site in question, is worth noticing.

I agree with Mike that it’s definitely not just “sticking an intern on it” and letting it fly from there. That isn’t to say that our interns wouldn’t be capable as anyone else to handle this problem, but as the root of this discussion seems to be in crisis monitoring and management, it is important to realize that this is a big deal, perhaps one day even mission critical, for some operations.

Internet etiquette

There are two issues I’ve struggled with lately, both of which I think are unique to the internet/blogging age.

First, when I’m leaving a comment on another blog I’m always torn about which one of my blog URLs to leave.  Most of the time the decision is based on what the topic of the post and/or blog is.  If it’s movie related I’ll leave my MMM address.  If it is advertising/PR related then I’ll generally leave the address for AdJab.  Occasionally I drop PRR’s URL but only if I feel like giving it some love.  It’s not one of my two main outlets so unfortunately PRR winds up being treated like an unwanted stepchild.  If anyone else out there has multiple URLs I’d be curious to hear how you make that decision.

The second one is more of a formality issue.  When I’m addressing someone I don’t know I tend to use the “Mr.” or “Ms.” title but feel vaguely strange doing so in this informal blogging context.  My upbringing was such that anyone I didn’t know was given this formality until they specified it’s drop or we established a relationship that overcame it.  Of course this gets to the larger issue of who do we “know.”  I say that I know guys like Tom Biro and Pete Vonder Haar but honesty if they broke into my house in order to raid my liquor cabinet and make off with my Tivo I wouldn’t recognize them, having never seen pictures.  Likewise, I could pass one of them on the street and they wouldn’t know me at all.  How do we need to redefine the concept of relationships now that we communicate openly and freely across state or national boundries but in a manner that, if not anonymous, is about as far from being truly inter-personal as you can get?

Maybe I think about these things too much but I’d be interested in some other perspectives on these issues.

Movie Journal Quick Takes 10/16/05

• 9/23 – The Muse: The second part of my mini-Albert Brooks marathon was not quite as good as Lost In America but still full of dry, self-deprecating humor and a pretty good story. Andie McDowell is undeniably beautiful but boy is she a waste as an actor. Sharon Stone didn’t quite go far enough with the titular role in my opinion. Brooks and the host of cameos by Hollywood luminaries are really the stars here.
• 9/27 – Firefly: Watched in anticipation of Serenity. You can check out my recaps at TVSquad, which I summarized in parts One, Two, Three and Four at Cinematical.
• 9/27 – Husbands & Wives: I decided to rewatch this film, which was sort of my introduction to Woody Allen when it hit cable after generating all sorts of controversy at the time of it’s release. Still one of my favorites.
• 9/30 – Alice: A very good Allen film with Mia Farrow, William Hurt and Joe Mantegnia starring. Cool mix of serious and comical elements.
• 10/2 – Serenity: I’ll be writing a longer review of this later. Suffice it to say I thought it rocked.
• 10/3 – Interiors: This, Allen’s first serious film after making his name in comedy, is probably the weakest of his movies I’ve seen. I just don’t think he felt comfortable yet and it shows. Still pretty good but not the caliber of his earlier or later works.
• 10/6 – D.E.B.S: Kind of fun. A mix of camp and…alright it was all camp. You have to wonder what exactly convinced some of the bigger actors in this to accept the roles.
• 10/7 – Prozac Nation: Very good movie with Christina Ricci in the lead. I thought she – and the entire film – was very effective at making the point of creativity, frustration, and some of the things those on the outside deal with when someone suffers from both. I really enjoyed it.
• 10/10 – A Very Long Engagement: I love Audrey Tautau and she’s great in this. It’s a bit long but never really drags as she looks for her fiance who was presumed dead during World War I. The supporting roles of the uncle and aunt who care for Tautau add both a wonderful heart to the movie as well as some much needed comedy.
• 10/14 – The Brown Bunny: Awful. I had heard so much bad stuff about this but figured there must be something about it that other people were missing. I was wrong. I can’t tell which bothered me more, the first six-minute long driving down the highway while nothing happens sequence or the sixth six-minute long driving down the highway while nothing happens sequence. Vincent Gallo plays what can only be described as a man suffering from acute social retardation who drives around trashy neighborhoods picking up random chicks and visiting people who don’t remember him. It’s almost Manos, the Hands of Fate bad. Actually, the presence of Torgo might have brought back my interest in the movie. As it was I wound up watching the whole thing while fast-forwarding with the subtitles on so I knew when someone was speaking, which rarely happened. Watched the entire thing in half the time and didn’t miss a thing. It was just terrible. Shows almost a complete lack of film-making skill or editing judgement. Gallo should have his SAG card revoked since there’s absolutely no evidence of him acting in this movie.
• 10/16 – Angel, Season 3: Great season that really had the show finding more than it’s stride. In fact this season almost seems like it was the show’s very purpose. It tore down what had come before (Angel & Darla’s relationship, Wesley as a person, etc) and set up what was to come (watch the show with the knowledge of seasons four and five and check out how much foreshadowing goes on). I’ve long maintained that the Watchers, Wesley and Giles, were two of the most interesting characters in the Buffy-verse and this season shows why that’s true in Wesley’s case. Good stuff.

Quick Takes: 10/7/05

• I’m sure everyone has seen that Google released with little to no warning an RSS reader named  – wait for it – Google Reader.  You can catch reviews from the Unofficial Google Weblog and Download Squad.  My impressions?  It’s very slow right now and takes about a half-hour to accept changes/additions.  Ask again in a couple days when traffic dies down and some of the bugs get worked out.
• Karen at the Media Relations Blog asks an important question: Are you ready for PR?
• Yahoo! has published a blogging white paper (Adobe Acrobat required.)

I got tagged!

How did I not know until just now (while doing an ego-search) that there was a Technorati tag for “thilk“? Everybody has to start using this!

Password check

eMarketer passes along this survey by RSA Security that says 28% of executives and upper management types have over 13 passords. Now I’m not upper management but I am a heavy internet user, especially in the Web 2.0 functionality sense. So here are the sites I have passwords to.

-GMail (two accounts)

-Bloglines (two accounts)

-Blogger (Movie Marketing Madness)

-PRBlogs.org (Public Relations Ramblings)

-WordPress.com (Thilk’s Blog – still developing)

-Odeo (I’m working on developing a podcast)

-JotSpot (I’m working on starting a wiki)

-Whiteboard

-Blogsmith (for the WIN blogs)

-del.icio.us

-Work (five at least)

So that’s 17 by my count, and those are just the things I’m actively working on. There are also at least two abondoned web-based email accounts, two RSS readers that I started but didn’t like as much as Bloglines and numerous other things that I only go back to occasionally. Take a moment today and think about how many passwords you rely on as part of your daily routine. In fact, if you’re a blog writer make up your own post about it, link back to here, and let’s get a meme going.

Quick Takes: 10/6/05

• Get a quick PR 101 course from Robert A. Kelly here.
• One of the problems I consistantly run into is when someone asks me how a company can measure the success of a blog in a quantifiable manner.  Apparently (and thankfully) I’m not the only one wondering about that.
• Web 2.0 and The Long Tail: Parts One and Two.
• Small businesses see good results from their websites but not all of them are using them well.  How much do you think an SEO specialist could do to some of these?
• 12 steps to fight your blog addiction.  I really need to take this course.
• Marketing in the world of consumer generated media is tough, but here are some ways to tap into the power of the new word of mouth.

Subscribing to PRR

I’ve heard some people are having trouble subscribing to PRR’s RSS feed.  Here’s the link that should work (I’ve tried it in Bloglines and it works there).  That link is to the left labeled as RSS 2.0.

How do you tag?

I’m increasingly fond of tagging as a way to save online articles I otherwise would have printed out or copied and pasted into a Word document. I myself use del.icio.us and use it in two ways.

First, as a repository for interesting stories I come across. This is probably the most common usage of services like this. Tagging stories and other web pages in this manner, along with reading websites with RSS feeds via an aggregator, has almost completely eliminated the need for a “Bookmarks” or “Favorites” functionality within an internet browser. Why would I clutter that up when I can just as easily save it to an online site I can access whether I”m at work, home or on the road?

Secondly, as an online portfolio for myself. I save all my Movie Marketing Madness columns, and also have links in there to my “profiles” on the Weblogs, Inc sites I write for (AdJab, etc). That way, should someone be curious as to how or what I’ve written about all I have to do is point them to my del.icio.us page and they can see it for themselves.

So do you use a tagging site and if so how?

LINKS:
del.icio.us – http://del.icio.us/
My del.icio.us – http://del.icio.us/CThilk