Morgan McLintic on PR

Starry Night

Alex Yenni just sent me this machinima video shot in Second Life. Awesome.

Technorati Tags: machinima, Second Life

Save Business2.0

The NYT is reporting its imminent demise, with the September issue potentially being the last. But fear not, because as Megan McCarthy at ValleyWag points out, Facebook could come to the rescue! Yes, do your bit by joining the 'I read Business2.0 - and I want to keep reading!' group. Set up by editor Josh Quittner Colin Carmichael, it currently has 84 members.

And BTW are there really 29,359 people who want to remove the 'is' from the Facebook status message? Good - make that 29,360.

UPDATE - Josh Quittner did not set up the group. In fact it was created by Colin Carmichael who subsequently promoted him to Officer, as Colin states below. Apols Colin.

Technorati Tags: Business2.0, Facebook, ValleyWag

Clogger launches Copypunk

Tired of baiting Scoble, Silky's launching a new blog about copywriting called Copypunk. I love his insight and cutting humor. Subscribed.

How long until we see Fakebook profiles?

How long will it be until we see fake friends, character profiles and guerilla marketing groups on Facebook? Not long I predict (and maybe I'm missing them already). Remember the character blogs and flogs like Captain Morgan and Lincoln Fry we saw with blogging? A brand could easily create a nominally topical group, say Glasgow Free Forever, get people to join and then use it to create a self-selecting audience - in this case those interested in Glasgow tourism perhaps.

Handled well, this could be great. Handled badly, and people will feel duped and push back against the company.

Ditto with Friends, a tactic long hawked on MySpace. It might even be fun to be updated on the imagined thoughts and happenings of brand mascots or personalities. Perhaps I might want to be associated with that brand in my Friends, and of course there's the chance for direct dialog. If you are promoting a television series, what better way to keep people up to date on the characters between season than via a social network profile?

Sounds like a lot of work though, huh? It's another channel to manage? Well, you might not get the choice. If you as a marketer don't seize the opportunity to create your group or your profile, then others will. They might be your biggest fans, or naysayers or competitors. Take Jack Daniels, a brand I quite favor - there are already 500+ JD groups all using the Jack Daniels brand assets, as well as 158 profiles called Jack Daniels, some of which use the logo too. Your voice might get lost in the crowd, but if you truly are the brand, you presumably have access to the best content, understand the audience better and have the most resources to apply.

Whatever your thoughts on Facebook, ffor consumer-facing brands, and even for many business-oriented brands, at the moment, it's part of the communications fabric, whether you embrace it or not.

Technorati Tags: Facebook

SEO PR - missing the target?

The final panel at the recent PRSA T3 conference was about Search Engine Optimization, specifically SEO for press releases. It was a good panel, and I like SEO. I don't see why you would produce content and not want people to find it easily.

But I think, somewhere along the line, some folks have missed the point. We were offered a case study of a firm which had been asked to promote a news story for a publication. It produced a press release highlighting the fact that this particular publication had broken the story, and associating the two. Excellent tips were offered about how to improve the ranking of content in search engines. But the end result was that the press release ranked higher than the publication's story itself. In fact, it took positions one and two in the organic rankings with the publication, and really the topic of the announcement, coming in third.

Full marks for SEO skills, but doesn't this rather defeat the objective? The release was meant to draw attention to the story, not replace it. A press release is a vehicle for the media (and some might argue not a particularly good one for that). What it's not good for is end-users, consumers, prospects or customers. The promotional marketing toolkit has lots of better vehicles for those audiences.

I asked a few people after the session what they thought. Everyone said you want people to find your content online. Agreed. No-one said they'd ever bought anything based on finding a press release. Everyone agreed a PR team should know which media might be interested in a press release, and that they should be approached directly. No-one felt that media would spend much time reading releases they'd stumbled across on the web. Everyone agreed that if you were going to choose content to SEO, a blog post, or areas of the company's website might be better. Several thought that despite that, I'm wrong and resisting the inevitable.

I like SEO. I think it makes sense and appreciate the delicate art of matching word selection, order and repetition to make content rank as highly as possible. But am I alone in thinking the humble press release is a direct vehicle for a specific audience (namely the media)?