Just two quick plugs for Josh Hallett and Mike Manuel this week…

Josh has a contributed story appearing in the May issue of PRSA’s PR Tactics, which was published online earlier this week. It’s about how practitioners can use social media to enhance and extend their media relations efforts. He also offers some tips on the importance of blogger relations (an excerpt from the article):

“Using blogs to reach traditional media sounds like the meeting of matter with anti-matter. Some say that blogs are the antithesis of media. Recent studies indicate that ever more journalists are looking to blogs for story leads and quotes, among other things. Combine this with the number of journalists who now count a blog as a publishing medium and the line between blogs and journalism is blurring more than ever.”

And Mike was up at the NewComm Forum this week, co-presenting a case study on corporate blogging with the good folks from PlayStation (an excerpt from his blog post).

“The case study chat with the new media team behind Sony PlayStation’s blog went well yesterday afternoon at the NewComm Forum, we actually covered a lot of ground - everything from content development and technical design to community management tactics and measurement. By the end of our session, the PlayStation guys had shared 15 “lessons learned” over the last year.”

Great stuff….

A couple of memes have sprouted up around the web from influential media and analysts about how they would like to be pitched in the future. Folks like Stowe Boyd and Marshall Kirkpatrick are turning to the communication channels they like best to help cut through the noise In an increasingly loud media space.

First to offer up a suggestion was Stowe Boyd. Stowe requested that PR firms pitch him through Twitter. The 140 character limit on Twitter keeps the pitches brief, which helps Stowe focus. It also gives him a chance to see how other people on Twitter feel about the story before he makes a decision to cover it. Voce’s Katie Watson was the first to take Stowe up on his request, and we’re excited to see where it will lead.

Marshall Kirkpatrick was the next to request 2.0 style PR pitches for Read/Write Web. Marshall’s preferred delivery for pitches was as an RSS feed, which he explained is where he consumes most of his content in a feed reader. Soon afterward, Matt Craven from the Blog Herald strongly supported Marshall’s preference and requested feeds for pitches as well. Again, we were quick to pick up on this request and were more than happy to provide them with an OPML of our feeds.

Read the rest of this entry »

Last week at the Bulldog Reporter’s Media Relations Summit 2008, I had the pleasure of watching Voce’s own Dave Black deliver a presentation with Jodi Baumann, the Director of Corporate PR at NetApp. The focus of this year’s summit was “The Power of Story: New media, New Technologies, A New Narrative for PR.” Speakers tackled topics ranging from “The Art of Story: Finding the Heart of Drama” to preparing an organization for crisis, to running attendees through a bootcamp on social media strategies for PR. Industry influencers such as Tom Foremski, Robert Scoble, and Don Clark were among the media present for the event.

All good stuff, but what if I’m an in house PR person and my budget has been slated only for “traditional PR” activities (media relations, press release distribution etc.). This is where Dave and Jodi’s presentation, How PR Can Get a Fair Share of the Marketing Budget in a Web 2.0 World, fit into the social media/PR in 2008 puzzle. The presentation focused on how to stop “thinking like PR person” start gaining mindshare in all areas of marketing, and how to use Web 2.0 as a beachhead to support various parts of the company. (Not to mention a brief foray into “what in the world does beachhead mean anyways?”)

We’re living large at the Affinia hotel in Manhattan, talking about social media and making real-life friends (not just the virtual ones). We’re representing Voce at this week’s BlogHer Business Conference, and it’s been a great week so far. Here’s a quick recap:

Festivities started at a launch party for the New York City Moms Blog on Wednesday night. Graco and client Yahoo! sponsored the launch party; check out the Flickr stream. I’m a contributing writer for the Silicon Valley Moms Blog, and was excited to meet some of my fellow writers on the “other” coast.

One highlight of the evening was a special guest appearance by the producers from the Today show! Yes, Today is working on a “mommy blogger” segment to air later this month, and three of my fellow bloggers were interviewed. Very cool!

BlogHer Business started the next day (yesterday, actually), with some great speakers (including Method, HP and Graco) and included several interesting topics (SEO, podcasting, community-building, etc.). One thing is for certain: there are a lot of women blogging, and lots of companies marketing to them. More to come as the conference continues…

A few weeks ago, Fortune Small Business interviewed Richard Brewer-Hay, eBay’s editor-in-chief, to discuss a new corporate blog he was developing called “eBay Ink.” This blog debuted (publicly) yesterday afternoon, and we’re happy to say our team had a hand in the development of this project with Richard and the eBay team.

In addition to this project, we helped launch another eBay blog this week, ebayinsiderblog.com. It’s a group blog for eBay’s ‘Style Squad,’ a collective that writes about pop culture, fashion, gadgets, and home design.

Read the rest of this entry »