Tech-new-rati (and Other PR Blog Jots)

Technorati Revamp

Communications Overtones

Kami Huyse details the changes to the popular blog search and ranking site Technorati, announced in Dave Sifry’s blog earlier this week. In what Kami feels may be troubling to PR practitioners using the site to track trends and blogs on behalf of clients, Technorati will no longer be issuing a ranking to blogs and appears to have dropped certain elements of its RSS functions. “In other Technorati news that could explain the rework of the site, Om Malik passes on fact that Technorati is looking for a new chief executive (Dave Sifry will stay on in a product development role). With so much change going on at Technorati, it behooves those of us that depend heavily on the service it delivers to do our jobs to keep up with the news.”

Crystal Clear

Mike’s Points

Mike Driehorst underlines the continued importance of transparency in social media marketing. Letting the social media audience in on your agenda is key, he argues, to opening up the lines of conversation and allowing the blogosphere (or web community, or bulletin-board readers, etc.) to reach its own conclusions with all the information. Traditional PR approaches that one may take with a journalist, a natural skeptic according to Mike, aren’t going to work when the audience is just a group of average Joes. He takes a page from Dale Carnegie’s famous sales manual, How to Win Friends and Influence People, to advise marketers on approaching the social media world. “Become genuinely interested in other people: People are most interested in themselves. Talk in terms of the other person’s interests: Find the interests of others and talk about those things. Make the other person feel important: People yearn to feel important and appreciated. The words of Carneige’s book will work in a one-on-one, social gathering — and in a one-on-one, social medium.”

Blogola Essential to Web Marketing?

Strumpette

Amanda Chapel points out that blogola, the practice of handing out “freebies” to bloggers in exchange for coverage of a product or service, is actually an essential element of web marketing—or rather, she seems to claim it is a necessary evil of the industry. Without the ability to hand out freebies and “incentify” blogger coverage, marketers have very little power to influence the blogosphere. That being said, she also calls out top marketing guru Joe Jaffe, quoting from a recent podcast in which he defends the Nikon D-80 program but admits that there is definitely “reciprocity” implied; the bloggers receiving the cameras are more likely to give a positive review. “Fact is most reporters, e.g. NYT, WSJ, BusinessWeek, Forbes, etc. , can't even accept a free lunch anymore because of new ethics guidelines. The era of wining, dining and bribing reporters is long over. So the PR industry has now leveled its sites on the horde of unprofessional bloggers.”