Blog Bits - Week of October 3rd

The week Steve Rubel is calling the marketing troops together to "Go the Distance." "The marketing community has got 75% of social media mastery under its belt. They conceptually get its importance, how it evolves marketing from a monologue into a dialogue and the importance of listening. What they don't get is the last 25% - how to put this into action immediately."  He also presents there ideas as to how to deal with this situation.

1) Hands-on Workshops: PRSA, Ragan, the IABC, PR Week and other organizations need to start running hands-on workshops - not just panels with bloggers.

2) Integration: Let's not do what we did back in the 1990s where we had lots of agencies with interactive divisions that had no connection to the mother ship.  We need integration.

3) Encouragement: There's no easier way to get people learning about blogs, wikis, podcasets, RSS, tagging, etc. than to get them to try it. Hill and Knowlton's effort is exemplary.  But it's a first step. We need to get more agency heads blogging.

Katie Paine wrote a brief report on the Third Annual Measurement Summit held in Durham New Hampshire from September 28th to October 1st.  There were more than 100 attendees, and from her report it sounds like it was a great time and sharing/networking opportunity.  "The talks were, as usual, very high level and there was much more of a focus on marketing and branding than on media relations." Our Vice President of Professional Services and Customer Support, Patricia Fennessey, also attended and spoke at the conference, and looks forward to attending the Fourth Annual Measurement Summit!

A new Blogger Survey 2005 with a total of 821 respondents is out!  It was designed to "better understand blogger's attitudes towards corporations and PR firms as well as help clients understand why and how they should engage the blogosphere." With a variety of viewing options like, survey charts, free-form answers, geographic data and language data, you can see a variety of responses to questions ranging from, "What is the primary reason you blog?" to "if you know a message is sent to you from a PR firm, how much are you likely to trust it on a scale between 1 and 10, where 1 is 'not at all' and 10 is 'complete trust'? (the average response was a 4.60) Another interesting section is the free-form answers where there are 872 written responses to the question: How do companies and their firm's PR representative generally interact with you?