The Dripping Point (and Other PR Blog Jots)

The Dripping Point
Communications Overtones
I’m fond of pointing out that the Mississippi River starts out as just an average stream way up in Minnesota, or talking about how a major Fortune 100 company started out in someone’s garage. Kami uses the same idea to discuss how social media is affecting business, comparing it to a dam bursting that starts with just a single drip creeping through a tiny crack. How close we are to that dam coming down (in more than just a small number of savvy companies) is up for debate. Kami urges everyone to heed Geoff Livingston’s calls for evangelism of social media, while emphasizing at the same time that traditional PR shouldn’t be forgotten in the process. “I think that they only way toward success is to embrace the new model of communication without throwing out all that has come before.  It may be trite, but "don't throw the baby out with the bath water" applies perfectly to my water analogy. To understand our future, we must study the past.”

Video Killed The...Podcast?
A Shel of my Former Self
The debate has been ongoing, and Shel Holtz asks the question once more: why hasn’t podcasting gone mainstream? This post was timely, as I read it shortly after hearing a discussion of video vs. podcasting between Chip Griffin and Chris Brogan, in which both agreed that while video seems to be attracting more commercial success, is it really that much more compelling to see someone along with hearing them? What does video bring to the table that has sparked more interest? Shel agrees that the rise of video shouldn’t be solely to blame for a lack of podcasting blockbusters. He cites the technology, which may be commonplace to us may still be foreign to the mainstream. Shel, my mom wouldn’t have the first idea about RSS, either. Also to blame? Lack of a standardized infrastructure. “So if Internet video’s phenomenonal rise isn’t to blaim for the stagnation in podcasting’s growth, what is? The answer, I believe, is infrastructure. There is not a simple infrastructure common across the podcasting world that makes it drop-dead easy to download podcasts and transfer them to a portable device.”

Per-fessional?
Personal Branding Blog
Where do you draw the line in blending your personal and professional contacts online? The hub of this problem seems to be Facebook, and Dan Schwabel has a thoughtful post questioning how to manage what are essentially two different lives intersecting in a common venue. The stories of employees getting into hot water over Facebook or MySpace content (photos in particular) are ubiquitous (actually, Larissa Fair also has a great post over at the Buzz Bin wondering if companies who encourage social networking but punish for online content aren’t just a little hypocritical), so how do we manage when worlds collide? “Facebook is a place for your professional and personal lives now. It has evolved and broadened it’s audience, to increase the installed base. For college students that used Facebook pre-business days, our concerns are real. How would you like it if you established a social “friend” network and then had your manager and advertisers adding you as a friend and sending you messages?”

Go, Go Gadget Advertisement! (Just not to the landfill)
Brand Flakes for Breakfast
There’s little doubt that I’m not exactly the greenest blogger on the Web. I drive an SUV, drink my water from an endless series of plastic bottles (though I do at least recycle the ones I drink at work!), and took no part in Blog Action Day (the topic was the environment). Yet Darryl Ohrt’s post over at the always-charming Brand Flakes blog got to me—after all, we hardly think twice to toss out the ubiquitous ad inserts that end up in every magazine or paper, so how responsible was it for Yellow Tail wine to put fancy LED lights into their latest flyer? Darryl exposes the relatively shocking amount of hardware in the ad and wonders how the landfills will like it. “You've seen this before - cute, and attention-getting. And probably a significant budget expenditure for the brand. What they didn't consider was that they'd also be putting hundreds of thousands of electronic parts into a landfill. Not a great practice for a product that originates from the earth. It's not easy being green. Customer perceptions and cares are changing. And as creatives, we're not all accustomed to thinking about the impact of our physical campaigns.”

Comments

[Kami Huyse]

And long live the drips...

Changing the subject, I can really relate to your take on being green, there is average consumption and then there is clueless. Great read.

Oh, and great BlogTalk Radio show yesterday

[Larissa Fair]

Thanks for the mention. I do think that until hard rules are set, there will always be a gray area with balancing personal vs. professional regarding social media and social networks. However, do we really want "rules" to be established? I'm not sure...but it certainly is a topic that affects a lot of somewhat conflicting interests per my "hypocritical" comment