Aarti Shah with PRWeek pens this week’s cover story on client Sony PlayStation. (Full PDF Version) The piece is a bit of a case study that recounts some of the company’s fairly well-known missteps over the years, but more importantly, it digs into PlayStation’s rebound and recovery efforts the last 18 months — and how their social media strategy is leading the way.

“After a huge misstep in the blogosphere, Sony PlayStation has come back with a plan to engage consumers and win back trust.”

If you’ve been reading my stuff for a while, you’ll know I’m a big believer that our industry *desperately* needs more case studies. I started to talk about this program for the first time earlier this year at the NewComm Forum. This cover story peels back another layer, and we’ll continue to share more leading into the fall at a handful of industry speaking gigs including the PRSA International Conference in October.

And yes, before you ask, that’s exactly how I sit in all my client meetings. Enjoy.

Related Links:
Submit Now! 2008 SNCR Excellence in New Communications Awards

[Photo credit: PRWeek - Cross Posted to Media Guerrilla]

I have been to many trade shows over the years, from the glitzy (CES) to the dorky (WinHEC) to the niche (Webmaster World). I have managed booth-duty, staffed press briefings, and tracked down press and analysts on-the-fly. And at each of these shows, I typically avoided the lame-ass schwag bags handed out to attendees.

But then, I attended my fourth BlogHer, which I now refer to the Shangri-La of Schwag. Quite honestly, no other show compares when it comes to sponsors handing out goodies, offering samples and trials, and tugging at heartstrings. Here are my highlights from last week’s BlogHer 08 in San Francisco:

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A while back Manuel sent around an internal email asking what everyone thought about Newsvetter. At the time, my head was filled with thoughts about PR spam. So, when I looked at the service by following the link in Manuel’s email, I thought it was a service designed to combat PR spam. I promptly tweeted a question that popped into my head. Andrew Fowler, Newsvetter’s creator, saw that tweet and reached out to me. We set up a phone call to discuss the service, and I learned that I missed the boat entirely. Newsvetter does have a PR spam fighting quality, but that’s more like a cool side effect than it’s focus.

What is Newsvetter and how does it work?

Newsvetter is a service enables story pitchers to submit ideas to the media through a structured process. The structure was based on some research Andrew did with media to determine what are the common criteria for evaluating a story. Media, and media only, can then comment on and rate the ideas as a vetting process in a closed environment that essentially works as a backchannel (visible to the pitchers).

While the service does connect people, the truth is that the service doesn’t need to have a ton of members to be useful. PR professionals can use the story brief form as a template for writing pitches, which is made from the common criteria Andrew surfaced from interviewing the media. Journalists and bloggers can require people pitch them through the service to guarantee that their required questions are answered and to solicit opinions from other media contacts. Naturally, as the service expands networking and reputation can play a larger role. PR firms may one day point to their Newsvetter rating, which is based on their percentage of stories that are picked up, as validation during their new business pitches.

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We’re happy to be working with Nuance

Read more about The Voce Wall….

We told you we were living large in Manhattan at the BlogHer Business Conference and New York City Moms Blog launch party last month.

We knew the Today Show producers were interviewing a few of the mom bloggers at the party and the crew was filming conference panels. But we when we watched this morning’s “Today’s Woman” segment on the growing popularity of momblogging, we were stoked to see that our friends at Silicon Valley Moms Group, Graco and client Yahoo! got air time. Check out the eco-friendly Yahoo! taxis that chauffeured the moms to the party!

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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….

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 happy to be working with BEA.

Read more about The Voce Wall….

It’s easy at times to overlook or maybe just under-estimate the importance of bridging online connections and relationships with the offline world, especially in the context of a social media-driven program, but I think client Sony did a good job making this connection earlier this week with their PlayStation Blogger Lounge at the Game Developers Conference.

The Sony folks actually used a variety of social media tools, including their corporate blog, a Socialtext wiki, Twitter, Flickr, and Crackle, among other things, to augment and extend the online experience with the offline one….

Does social media tend to drive people towards more isolation from the real world or the opposite? I was asked this question recently in an interview. What do you think?

I answered that it can do both, depending on the nature of the individual, i.e. if you’re already a bit of a loner then online communication can help drive your further away from society. However, I think from my experience that interactions online also help foster new real-world relationships and communications. A great example of this is conferences and events.

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