Lines continue to blur between bloggers and reporters

It’s becoming increasingly difficult to draw a line between bloggers and reporters, and communicators should have a renewed interest in the online landscape if they’re not already active there.

PaidConteng.org’s parent company, ContentNext Media, just named former Dow Jones executive Nathan Richardson as its new CEO.

Dean Takahashi, formerly a reporter at the San Jose Mercury News, recently left the paper for VentureBeat. Rieva Lesonsky is leaving Entrepreneur to start her own Web site venture.

More examples abound of reporters moving to online ventures, but print publications are also snapping up existing blogs to incorporate them into their online plans or aggregating content and essentially creating an ad network to sell ads on those blogs.

Media companies are partnering with groups of blogs to form ad networks and content aggregators to get a share of the revenue that has been largely controlled by search engines. (Disclosure: Our client, Six Disciplines, will partner in the Forbes network.)

It’s a two-way street with reporters crossing over into blogs and blogs crossing over into media company networks. Communicators need to know who their audience is reading and where. Pundits have been saying it for awhile now but it’s even more applicable today – if you’re a communicator, you need to have a working knowledge of blogs, especially those that relate to your client and their industries.

Courtesy of my colleague Allen Arnold, here’s something he deemed fitting: a song Bob Dylan wrote about print news outlets:

Come gather 'round people

Wherever you roam

And admit that the waters

Around you have grown

And accept it that soon

You'll be drenched to the bone.

If your time to you

Is worth savin'

Then you better start swimmin'

Or you'll sink like a stone

For the times they are a-changin'

-- by Tonja Deegan

For Those Who Love Eavesdropping: Emirates Airlines to Allow In-Flight Cell Phone Use

Emirates Airlines and AeroMobile have announced that Emirates flights will begin to offer in-flight mobile phone use. This venture will allow passengers not only to call their loved ones about the pot-roast in the oven back home but also the ability to drop a text to their buddy about the latest on the March Madness scores, all in the comfort of their middle, bathroom row airplane seat.

Emirates also announced that they have already placed the first officially mobile call at 30,000 feet from Casablanca to Dubai. According to Emirates, passengers will only be allowed a certain amount of calls per flight and the flight crew will be anointed the ability to shut off the system, if abuse is occurring. That would be a fun job! The airlines will also require the phones to be turned to silent or vibrate while on the plane and will not allow calls during night flights and other periods of the flight such as takeoff and landing.

It is very interesting to see that airlines are beginning to offer this service. I can image that business-types have a strong desire to be able flex their Blackberry fingers, and be connected at all times.

I think it would be cool if someone started a blog about the conversations they hear while flying, helplessly eavesdropping on someone’s cell phone conversation. I can only imagine the wild and crazy stories you’d overhear on a flight from Abidjan to Dubai.

-- by Allen Arnold

Twitter brings real time updates to conferences

As the benefits of Twitter remain murky at best to some, an example of its usefulness and value came to light during recent events. Aside from hearing what someone’s having for lunch, or their pet’s health problems, the instant status updates serves business-related purposes.

During the Apple SDK announcement last week, I was anxiously awaiting word on the new updates. As 10 o’clock came around, my Twitter feed started hopping. Writers attending the event started posting tweets, short updates in real time, announcing the updates and features.

This seems to be the trend for conferences. Just last week at the SXSW festival, Twittering seemed to be the preferred method for updates.

Information travels so quickly now with the convergence of Web-enabled mobile devices and micro-blogging services such as Twitter. Years ago before blogs, if an announcement was made at a conference the press would learn about it, write the story that night, send it off and have it published the next morning - or even longer depending on the pub. With the advent of blogs, journalists could step out of conferences and update their blogs immediately following the conference. Not quite real time but closer.

With Twitter, the press can update their network of “friends” as fast as they can peck out messages on their mobiles. There are other options to blog live from your phone but I don’t see them catching on yet. Twitter provides the instant gratification of capturing a quick thought the moment it occurs. Blogging - although not necessarily formal -- still requires more thought and revision, and is best suited for QWERTY-style typing.

-- by Ron Toledo

Social media measurement continues to focus on quality, not quantity

Recently, I attended an event sponsored by the PRSA and given by the Norcal Business Marketing Association titled Measuring the Naked Conversation- The ROI of Web 2.0.

Katie Delahaye Paine, author of Measuring Public Relationships: The Data-Driven Communicator’s Guide to Success, presented a lot of insight into social media. She said PR and marketing consultants held unavailable insight and experience to clients in the past. With the proliferation of social media and the ability for people to connect and share ideas, any person - for virtually zero cost - can get the collective experience and ideas of everyone else.

An important point about social media Katie reinforced is that it’s not a place to sell and market, it a place for conversation.  Participation may or may not drive sales, but it drives awareness. 

Brand awareness is a big factor for emerging companies and social media can play a significant role. As public relations professionals, we need to continue to change the mindset that the number of impressions is not as important as the quality of those impressions by putting blog and other online mentions into context.

We also have a role in educating and counseling our clients that have not ventured into this arena yet or are just starting to research it. It may be hard to believe for those that have been active online for several years now, but Web 2.0 101 education is still necessary, too.

-- by Ron Toledo